I think he just means the current situation of user numbers/footfall/reach/network or whatever you want to call it, of Nostr.

But Nostr can be seen in this WIP period as an additional source of revenue for people like this. Which currently happens a lot. There's a lot of fragmented and multiple revenue streams for content creators, although atm maybe substack and patreon are probably the top.  

 yeah, currently, paying for subscriptions has to be done out of band like https://nostr.wine and so forth

there needs to be a custom relay with web service designed for this purpose, then you could have a "subscription npub" and you zap it and it automatically subscribes you and you get read access to those events 

 note that because nostr is "leaky" (it's impossible to partition the data) this is a system of advance access because anyone with a subscription can republish

people would still go for this i think, because it guarantees early access, even if the popular ones are probably gonna percolate and go viral if they are virus worthy