To me, it's only partially about the monetization itself in terms of being able to accept payment - it's more about having easy ways to say "This is specifically for my people" And being able to set how that's defined/redeemed - it could be active subscriptions, NFT ownership, staked tokens, etc...

The public/open nature of Hive right now makes it hard to truly gate content - I think we need some sort of encryption to help with that (I'm no dev, so I don't know how that's achieved)

Honestly, some of what I heard on the recent episode of cryptomaniancs (Common - just change it to Hivemaniacs already ;) from @starkerz might be exactly what I'm describing, or at least the foundations for it.

If influencers can bring their community to Hive as a swap for Patreon, there's a ton of benefits - we're just missing a few features that prevent that from making sense.