Perplexity is launching a program to share ad revenue with publishing partners following weeks of plagiarism accusations.
Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue. Publishing partners will also get a free one-year subscription to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity’s developer tools, plus insights through Scalepost.ai, a new AI startup that helps secure partnerships between AI companies and publishers, such as how frequently their articles appear in search queries.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, declined to share exact deal terms but said that the revenue share is a multiyear agreement with a “double-digit percentage,” consistent across all publishers, with especially favorable terms for the initial partners. Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platnick added that payments are made on a per-source basis, meaning publishers are compensated for each article used in responses. The program will temporarily provide cash advances on revenue to publishers as Perplexity builds a long-term advertising model. The advances aren’t a licensing fee for content like OpenAI’s deals.
“It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero,” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told me via direct message. The publishing agreement doesn’t cover WordPress.org, but Automattic will be sending payments to direct customers of WordPress.com. “The amount, I don’t know! Probably small to start because they don’t make much revenue now, but if Perplexity is the next Google, which I think it has a chance of being, these numbers could become meaningful and we’re looking to help publishers get paid in every way we can.”
This new program comes a month after a Forbes editor found the publication’s paywalled reporting plagiarized in Perplexity’s new product, Pages, an AI-powered tool that lets users create a report or article based on prompts. The AI-generated version of the Forbes story, along with an AI-generated Perplexity podcast of the story, was then sent to subscribers via a mobile push notification, Forbes reported. Wired then published an investigation that found Perplexity’s AI was “paraphrasing WIRED stories, and at times summarizing stories inaccurately and with minimal attribution.” Forbes has since threatened legal action against Perplexity.
Still, taking content for free doesn’t seem like a moral issue to Perplexity
Shevelenko told me the company started work on this program back in January, well before the blowback, saying the team took inspiration from X’s ad revenue sharing program. Perplexity planned to launch this program last month amid the drama but decided to hold off until now, he said. I asked him if this was a well-timed apology tour or if it was just a stopgap to prevent lawsuits. “We don’t want people saying nasty things about us more than we don’t want to get sued,” Shevelenko said.
Shevelenko says it’s “not great” that people think of Perplexity as plagiarizing journalists’ work, particularly as “an aspiring consumer brand.” He also thinks the accusation isn’t quite fair, saying that people have been “tricking” the service’s AI to get these plagiarized results. Still, scraping and reprinting content doesn’t seem like a moral issue to Perplexity. Shevelenko said, “There’s intricacies of fair use and copyright law where we feel we’re kind of, you know, clearly within those bounds.”
For Perplexity, whether it is a way to make amends or not, the startup seems determined to set up long-term infrastructure to pay publishers for their content for as long as the company exists. Shevelenko said as much himself: “Obviously I’m not contemplating the scenario. But say, Perplexity dies and fails. You’re not losing anything, right? And if we’re successful, you’re riding in that upside.”
AI-powered search is more expensive than traditional search, so Perplexity needs to work quickly to cover the compute costs involved. In May, the startup raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation. “We need advertising to be successful because it is going to be our main business model,” Shevelenko said.
Paying publishers only adds to the costs, and Perplexity is aware it isn’t the norm for a search tool. “By the way, our investors don’t love that we’re doing this because they’re like, ‘Oh, we want you to have the same margin profile as Google,’” Shevelenko said, adding that Perplexity can’t compete with Google by mimicking their strategies. Instead, he says, the company wants to focus on building a profitable business by forming alliances with the media by creating the right long-term structures, like ad revenue sharing.
There’s also the looming threat of OpenAI, which just announced a prototype of its AI-powered search product, SearchGPT, alongside its own publishing partners like News Corp, The Atlantic, and The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media. It seems OpenAI has taken stock of Perplexity’s mistakes, too. In the announcement, the company said that publishers will have the ability to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features” and can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models and still be surfaced in search.
Shevelenko said Perplexity is “happy to give publishers full control there” only “to the extent to which it doesn’t make the product ugly.” For now, offering that control is a “work in progress.” Most importantly, Perplexity wants to avoid giving publishers the ability to change the answers.
It seems like AI companies will use publishers’ content whether they agree or not. The business side of the media industry seems to believe that accepting the money, rather than laying off staff to afford lengthy legal battles, is the best option for now. The CEO of The Atlantic, which recently made a deal with OpenAI, said on an episode of The Verge’s Decoder that they weighed all the benefits of a partnership versus what it would cost to sue and how much they would get from it, “and then you make a choice.”
So, if Perplexity wants to cut publishers a check for using their content, I think that’s good, actually. But it doesn’t answer a lot of questions, like what that means for publishers that aren’t getting a check or if the deals will amount to meaningful resources for newsrooms. In the face of a growing technology backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful, it doesn’t seem like the media has much of a choice.
