Perplexity AI unveiled a revenue-sharing model for publishers on Tuesday after more than a month of accusations of plagiarism. Media and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com are the first to join the company’s “Publisher Program.”
The announcement follows an onslaught of controversy in June, when Forbes said it found a plagiarized version of the original paywalled report on Perplexity AI’s Pages tool, with no media credit other than a small “F” logo at the bottom of the page. Weeks later, Wired said it was also found evidence that Perplexity plagiarized Wired stories and reported that an IP address “almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range” visited the parent company’s websites more than 800 times over three months.
The artificial intelligence startup, which specializes in AI-assisted search, aims to compete Googleraised new funding in April at a valuation exceeds $1 billion — doubling its valuation from three months ago.
Under the new affiliate program, whenever a user asks a question and Perplexity generates advertising revenue from mentioning one of the publisher’s articles in their answer, Perplexity will share a fixed percentage of that revenue. That percentage is calculated on a per-article basis, Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, told CNBC — meaning that if three articles from a publisher were used in one answer, the partner would receive “three times the revenue share.”
Sevelenko confirmed that the flat rate is in the double digits, but declined to elaborate.
Sevelenko told CNBC that more than a dozen publishers, including “major newspapers and the companies that own them,” had reached out with interest less than two hours after the program first aired.
The company’s goal, he said, is to have 30 publishers signed up by the end of the year, and Perplexity wants to work with some of the publishers’ ad sales teams so they can sell ads “against all of Perplexity’s inventory.”
“When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher’s content is mentioned, that publisher will also earn a share,” Perplexity wrote in a suspensionadding that the company will offer publishers API credits and will also work with ScalePost.ai to provide analytics to provide “deeper insights into how Perplexity reports on their content.”
Shevelenko told CNBC that Perplexity began working with publishers in January and solidified ideas for how its revenue-sharing program would work later in the first quarter of 2024. He said five Perplexity employees were dedicated to working on the program.
“Some of it came out of conversations we had with publishers about integrating APIs and Perplexity technology into their products,” Shevelenko said.
Perplexity’s new program comes amid an increasingly heated battle between AI startups and some media outlets and creators, as many publications aggressively seek to protect their businesses in the age of AI-generated content.
In June, the Center for Investigative Journalism, the nation’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and its lead backer Microsoft in federal court for alleged copyright infringement, following similar lawsuits from publications such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.
A group of prominent US authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement when using their work to train ChatGPT.
However, not all news organizations are gearing up for a fight, and some are joining forces with AI startups like OpenAI, Perplexity and others. OpenAI and Time magazine announced in June a “multi-year content agreement” that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time’s history. OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May with News Corp., allowing the company to access current and archived articles from the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, New York Post and other publications.
