What is your plan.
Both are viable.
You can first grow bigger then sell more expensive Options later to that bigger audience.
Or you can just charge more for less customers but probably will also have less cost to manage and get them.
The best answer to this is: IT DEPENDS
You gotta do the calculations and add the 5y and 10y strategy to it.
We get so much e-mails every day, it's hard to stand out and catch attention.
Also it's completely different form of consuming the content. A lot of people listen to podcasts while doing something. (household, driving, commuting, sleeping etc.)
Everything is hard to promote, but if you deliver VALUE and get a few FANS things get more easy.