Perplexity AI launched a revenue-sharing model for publishers on Tuesday after more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media organizations and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com are among the first to join the company’s Publisher Program and content platforms.
The announcement follows intense controversy in June Forbes says discovery A plagiarized version of the paywalled original story in the Perplexity AI page tool makes no mention of the media outlet other than a small “F” logo at the bottom of the page. A few weeks later, “Wired” said it also found Perplexity copied evidence reported by Wired, which reported that an IP address “almost certainly associated with Perplexity but not listed in its public IP range” was visited its parent company’s website more than 800 times in three months.
This AI startup specializes in AI-assisted search and aims to compete with Googleraised new funding at valuation in April over $1 billion – Its valuation has doubled from three months ago.
Under the new partner program, every time a user asks a question and Perplexity generates advertising revenue by citing an article from the publisher in their answer, Perplexity will share a fixed percentage of that revenue. Perplexity Chief Commercial Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told CNBC that the percentage is calculated on a per-article basis, meaning if three articles from one publisher are used in one answer, Partners will receive “three times the revenue share.”
Shevelenko confirmed the flat rate would be a double-digit percentage but declined to provide specifics.
Shevelenko told CNBC that less than two hours after the show premiered, more than a dozen publishers, including “major daily newspapers and the companies that own them,” contacted us with interest.
The company aims to have 30 publishers on board by the end of the year, he said, and Perplexity is looking to partner with some publishers’ ad sales teams so they can sell ads “across all Perplexity inventory.”
“When Perplexity earns revenue from interactions that reference a publisher’s content, the publisher will also receive a share,” Perplexity wrote in a statement. Blog articleIt added that the company will provide API credits to publishers and work with ScalePost.ai to provide analytics to provide “a deeper understanding of how Perplexity’s content is cited.”
Shevelenko told CNBC that Perplexity began working with publishers in January and solidified ideas on how its revenue-sharing plan would work later in the first quarter of 2024.
“Some of this stemmed from conversations we had with publishers about integrating the Perplexity API and technology into their products,” Shevelenko said.
Perplexity’s new initiative comes amid growing competition between artificial intelligence startups and some media agencies and creators, with many publications aggressively trying to protect their businesses in an era of artificial intelligence-generated content.
In June, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and key backers Microsoft Previously, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News also filed similar lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement.
A group of well-known American writers, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, accusing them of copyright infringement by using their works to train ChatGPT.
But not all news organizations are ready for battle. Some news organizations have joined forces with artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI and Perplexity. OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multiyear content agreement” in June that will give OpenAI access to current and archived articles from Time magazine’s more than 100-year history. OpenAI announced a similar partnership with News Corp. in May, giving the company access to current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post and other publications.
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