Perplexity is cutting checks to publishers following plagiarism accusations

Perplexity has launched a program to share ad revenue with publishing partners weeks after the plagiarism accusations.

Perplexity’s publisher program has recruited its first batch of partners, including big names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribuneand Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity displays content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue. Publishing partners will also receive a free one-year subscription to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity’s developer tools, as well as insights from Scalepost.ai, a new AI startup that helps secure partnerships between AI companies and publishers, such as how often their articles appear in search queries.

Perplexity’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevlenko, declined to share the exact terms of the deal but said the revenue share is a multi-year, “double-digit” percentage agreement consistent across all publishers, with particularly favorable terms for early partners. Perplexity spokeswoman Sarah Blatnick added that payments are made on a per-source basis, meaning publishers get compensated for each article used in the responses. The program will temporarily provide cash advances on revenue to publishers while Perplexity builds out a long-term advertising model. The advances are not licensing fees for content like OpenAI’s deals.

“It’s a much better percentage of revenue 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 send payments to direct WordPress.com customers. “How much, I don’t know! It might be small at first because they’re not making a lot of revenue right now, but if Perplexity is the next Google, which I think it has a chance of being, then these numbers could become meaningful and we’re looking to help publishers get paid in every way possible.”

This new program comes a month after Forbes The editor found that the reports paid for in the publication were plagiarized. In Perplexity’s new product, Pages, an AI-powered tool that lets users generate a report or article based on prompts. The AI-generated version of Forbes The story, along with the AI-generated Perplexity podcast, was then sent to subscribers via mobile push notification, Forbes It has been reported. Wired then Publish an investigation who found that Perplexity’s AI was “rewriting stories from WIRED, sometimes summarizing stories inaccurately and with minimal attribution.” Forbes He has since threatened legal action. Against confusion.

Shevlenko told me the company began working on the program in January, long before the backlash, saying the team was inspired by X’s ad-revenue-sharing program. He said Perplexity had planned to launch the program last month amid the drama, but decided to wait until now. I asked him if this was a timely apology tour or just a temporary solution to prevent lawsuits. “We don’t want people to say bad things about us any more than we want to be sued,” Shevlenko said.

Shevlenko says it’s “not cool” that people think Perplexity is stealing journalists’ work, especially as an “aspirational consumer brand.” He also thinks the accusation isn’t entirely fair, saying people were “tricking” the service’s AI to get these stolen results. However, scraping and reprinting content doesn’t seem like an ethical issue for Perplexity. “There are complexities with fair use and copyright law where we feel like we’re kind of, you know, clearly within those boundaries,” Shevlenko said.

For Perplexity, whether or not this is a way to make up for the loss, the startup seems intent on creating a long-term infrastructure to pay publishers for their content as long as the company exists. Shevlenko himself said as much: “Obviously I’m not thinking about that scenario. But let’s say Perplexity dies and fails. You don’t lose anything, right? And if we succeed, you’ll take advantage of that upside.”

AI-powered search is more expensive than traditional search, so Perplexity has to work quickly to cover the computing costs involved. In May, The startup has been uploaded. $250 million at a $3 billion valuation. “We need advertising to succeed because it will be our main business model,” Shevlenko said.

Paying publishers only adds to costs, and Perplexity knows that’s not the norm for a search tool. “Our investors, by the way, don’t like us doing this because they want you to have the same profit margin as Google,” Shevlenko says, adding that Perplexity can’t compete with Google by copying its strategies. Instead, he says, the company wants to focus on building profitable businesses by forming alliances with media outlets and creating the right long-term structures, such as ad revenue sharing.

There’s also the looming threat of OpenAI, which Just announced a prototype of an AI-powered search product.SearchGPT, along with its publishing partners like News Corp, Atlantic OceanAnd the edgeOpenAI’s parent company, Vox Media. OpenAI also seems to have taken Perplexity’s blunders into account. In the announcement, the company said publishers will have the ability to “manage how they appear in OpenAI’s search features” and can choose not to have their content used to train OpenAI models while still appearing in search.

Perplexity is “happy to give publishers full control there,” Shevlenko said, but only “to the extent that it doesn’t make the product ugly.” For now, providing that control is a “work in progress.” Most importantly, Perplexity wants to avoid giving publishers the power to change the answers.

It seems that AI companies will use publishers’ content whether they agree or not. The business side of the media industry seems to think that accepting the money, rather than laying off employees to endure long legal battles, is the better option at the moment. The CEO of Atlantic Oceanwhich recently struck a deal with OpenAI, He said in an episode of the edge‘s Decrypt They weighed all the benefits of the partnership against what it would cost to sue and what they would get out of it, “and then you have to make a choice.”

So if Perplexity wants to cut a check to publishers for using their content, I think That’s good, actually.But that doesn’t answer a lot of questions, like what it means for publishers who aren’t getting paychecks or whether the deals will provide meaningful resources for newsrooms. And faced with a growing technology backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies, the media doesn’t seem to have much choice.