[Yawrehto]

Except...what if the website is primarily targeted at people in a developing country who might not be able to pay, even if they wanted to? Then useful websites, providing useful information, would vanish. Your idea is good if the people are rich and willing to donate to good websites, but it completely breaks down once you consider websites where people may adore it and desperately want to donate, but be unable to.[1] It's fair that AI-BS websites probably shouldn't survive, but using money as a proxy for how much people like it unfairly catches websites in developing countries, where people might need that information the most. [1] Some quick googling turns up - and I have no idea about the reliability of these websites, but they do seem like good candidates for 'might provide valuable information but the community might not have the means', nyasatimes.com and horseedmedia.net, from Malawi and Somalia respectively. Also, looking at w3newspapers.com, there are a lot of online newspapers in very poor countries.

[solardev]

Are the costs of hosting (aside from domain registrations) usually borne by richer countries on behalf of poorer ones?

If not, if they're staffed and hosted in-country, I'd have thought their costs and profits would scale to regional costs of living. Like it takes less money to run a paper in Somalia than in New York. Is that a wrong assumption?

[Yawrehto]

Probably it does cost less - one imagines rent in Mogadishu is cheaper than in NYC - unless you're somewhere very unstable. But, I think it doesn't cost nearly as much less as it would in other industries, e.g., manufacturing. The cost of producing a story probably stays fairly similar across countries. And people have much less money to donate or click on the products the ads are hawking, so you're still not getting enough money.