Yes, this is basically the way stacker.news handles monetization. It sucks that people have to pay to speak though, especially if no one runs free relays. You could also have companies sponsoring relays to keep them open and free for everyone to write to.

relays are free to monetize however they’d like. @fiatjaf has an example on GitHub already that charges sats to be able to publish to that relay.

seems like with small start up things like this, usually you want to get people really on the platform before trying to be too heavy handed with montezation. Unless there was a way that people didn't find unintrusive and didn't turn them away.

You can definetly see when #[2] posted about nostr on Twitter:

✌️

This must be my 10th Nostr profile 😂