I asked this question on one of my Lemmy alts (still playing around if I prefer lemmy or kbin) and what I was told is the stats you are seeing when you view an external instance are the subscribers from YOUR instance. So you are viewing a lemmy.world magazine/community through kbin, the 92 is kbin subscribers for that community. To get the real number you need to view the stats on the original instance (the 1000 you saw).
I think its a pretty big flaw with the fediverse software right now and I think should be a priority fix (if it is at all possible to do that). Makes magazines/communities look inactive when you are searching for them on your instance if they are external. It drives people away from subscribing (I know it did me when I didn’t understand it at first) when you do a search on your instance as you just think there is no activity and don’t even bother clicking it. I imagine it would get pretty extreme if you host your own private lemmy or kbin and when searching for things to subscribe to on your instance, everything looks empty.
Just seeing this for the first time also, but one of the features they list is it looks like you can “block or boost” domains in your search results. I miss when Google let you block domains for results, so this would be a killer feature for me. I don’t mind paying, but just the pricing seems a bit odd. I could see myself paying $5 per month for unlimited searches, not sure if 300 or 1000 is enough, $25 per month for unlimited is crazy.