[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.