Online subscriptions to The Economist cost twice as much in NZ as the US. Why?

It is not just The Economist, if there is geo-based pricing, we in NZ usually get a raw deal. For example video games.

Tax is not enough to account for it. Our sales tax is 15%, so twice California, but we are paying well in excess of the difference and we did before the govt. started levying tax on overseas online sales.

I've noticed similar with different magazines. I wanted to subscribe to a popular magazine (can't remember which one it was), and it would've been significantly cheaper to order a digital subscription AND a monthly paper copy i the US, than a mere digital subscription in Europe. How is a digital delivery more expensive than a paper copy? Obviously there's some type of price gouging going on here. Needless to say, I didn't take the subscription as it felt blatantly unfair.

I can think of a couple of potential reasons.

Higher costs due to tax rates and/or cost to comply with New Zealand regulations spread over a relatively small subscriber base.

Small New Zealand subscriber base and New Zealand not being a main target market for The Economist means New Zealand subscribers do not generate as much additional advertising income as those in the US. This is offset by increased subscription rates.

Interesting observation. They display the price before asking for account details like place of residence. Sounds like a "job" for a VPN then?

The Economist has a decently large section on European news (being a UK newspaper) as compared to eg the NYTimes. One could argue that therefore the relative "value" is higher for a European than for a US citizen, and they might therefore be willing to pay different prices.

This hypothesis doesn't explain why it's expensive in New Zealand though ...

NZ has become ridiculous to live in even as a tech worker, especially so if you don’t own property.

Just came to Fiji few days ago and it’s a wake up call for all the “ow NZ is so remote so everything should cost a lot”.

Mobile data in Fiji is whopping 10x cheaper. Nappies 20x cheaper. Supervised RAT test - 6x cheaper.