Perplexity offers publishers the opportunity to receive a share of the revenue their articles generate when they are found by Comet’s artificial intelligence search engine.
Perplexity offers publishers the opportunity to receive a share of the revenue their articles generate when they are found by Comet’s artificial intelligence search engine.
Bloomberg notes that in this way Perplexity seeks to avoid criticism and settle lawsuits from some media outlets regarding the use of their materials. The company has already allocated $42.5 million in content payments to publishers participating in the program.
«AI is helping to build a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid. So we think this is actually the right decision, and we’re happy to make adjustments as we go», — said Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Media companies have long worried that chatbots and AI agents are reducing web traffic to their sites. Now, instead of typing their questions into search engines, people are increasingly asking them to chatbots. This has already led to the IT forum Stack Overflow losing half of its peak traffic — a decline that is also happening on other major platforms.
Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said the traditional model of media outlets relying on web traffic and clicks is an «outdated model».
«We just want to create a new standard of compensation», — she said.
In the new program, publishers will be able to earn money when their content receives web traffic through the Perplexity Comet browser, appears in search queries on Comet, and when it is used to perform tasks by the Comet AI assistant.
The funds to compensate publishers come from revenue generated from Comet Plus, a new subscription tier for the Comet browser that Srinivas described as similar to Apple Inc.’s Apple News+. Customers will pay $5 a month to access a curated set of content from publishers in the new Perplexity program. Publishers will receive 80% of the revenue, and Perplexity will receive the rest.
While AI companies like OpenAI and Google have inked individual multi-million dollar deals with major publishers to license and distribute content, Perplexity is one of the first AI startups to introduce a new method of sharing revenue based on how often content appears or how it helps users with queries.
Perplexity has also had disputes with some media organizations, including Forbes and Condé Nast, which accused the company of using their content in AI news summaries without permission. In addition, Aravind Srinivas, previously decided to intervene in the strike of IT workers at the New York Times. He offered his company’s services to mitigate the consequences of the picket during the US presidential election.
Cybersecurity company Cloudflare Inc. has also accused Perplexity of scanning and extracting data from websites, bypassing blocks designed to protect against such activity. Perplexity argues that its AI assistant does not scan web pages but instead accesses individual websites at the user’s request, and therefore should not be subject to the same rules.
As we’ll recall, Perplexity recently made a surprise offer to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion to gain control of the tool used by over 3 billion people worldwide. Last month, it raised $100 million at a valuation of $18 billion.
