I think you're confusing getting featured and having a premium comic.
Getting featured just means getting a staff pick or similar and having your comic appear in one of the categories on the front page. My comic has had a few (a staff pick, a community pick and another feature in a category called "Adventure!"), and you don't get paid for them and don't even get notified, so you usually only know when you suddenly get a flood of subscribers on a Friday or if a friend points it out like "hey you're on the front page!"
To get one of these, you really just need to make a polished comic or novel that looks professional with a good cover and thumbnail that won't look out of place in terms of quality on the front page and try to promote enough in threads the staff will see, or get recommended to them by....er... somebody? Probably some of the bigger creators? There used to threads to recommend community picks, but I think due to how easy it was for people to just sign up to the forums to dump their friend's comic into a thread, they've switched to having friends of the staff who make community comics recommend stuff they think is good.
To get paid on Tapas, outside of ink donations, you need to pitch to premium. For a novel, you can do this any time, but for a comic you currently need 2000 subs and for the thing you pitch to be Long Scroll format. You get assigned an editor and stuff if you do this. There's also pitching to Tapas studios, which you can do any time, but whatever you pitch will need to be a new comic that you're creating with a team.
