Perplexity launches ad revenue sharing program with publishing partners after weeks of plagiarism accusations.
Perplexity’s “Publisher Program” has recruited its first group of partners, including prestigious names such as Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribuneand Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under the program, when Perplexity serves content from these publishers in response to user queries, publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue. Publisher partners will also get 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 and provides data such as how often a publisher’s articles appear in search queries.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief commercial officer, declined to share the exact terms of the deal, but said the revenue share is a multi-year deal with a “double-digit percentage,” consistent across all publishers, with particularly favorable terms for initial partners. Sara Platnick, a Perplexity spokeswoman, added that payments are made on a per-source basis, meaning publishers are paid for each article used in responses. The program will provide publishers with temporary advances on revenue while Perplexity builds a long-term advertising model. The advances are not a licensing fee for content like OpenAI’s deals.
“That’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero,” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told me via direct message. The publishing deal doesn’t cover WordPress.org, but Automattic will send payments to WordPress.com’s direct customers. “I don’t know how much! Probably small at first, because they’re not generating a lot of revenue right now, but if Perplexity is the next Google, which I think it’s likely to be, those numbers could become significant, and we’re looking to help publishers get paid in any way we can.”
This new program comes a month after a Forbes The publisher discovered that the publication’s paid reports were being 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 Forbes The story, accompanied by an AI-generated Perplexity podcast, was then sent to subscribers via mobile push notification, Forbes reported. Cable subsequently published an investigation that found that Perplexity’s AI “paraphrased WIRED articles and sometimes summarized the articles inaccurately and with minimal attribution.” Forbes has since threatened to take legal action against Perplexity.
Yet taking content for free doesn’t seem to be a moral problem for Perplexity.
Shevelenko told me the company began working on the program in January, well before the backlash, saying the team was inspired by X’s ad revenue-sharing program. Perplexity had planned to launch the program last month amid the drama but decided to postpone it until now, he said. I asked him if this was a well-planned apology tour or just a stopgap to avoid lawsuits. “We don’t want people to say bad things about us, and we don’t want to get sued,” Shevelenko said.
Shevelenko says it’s “not great” that people think Perplexity is plagiarizing journalists’ work, especially as an “up-and-coming consumer brand.” He also thinks the accusation isn’t entirely fair, saying people have “tricked” the service’s AI into getting these plagiarized results. Still, scraping and reprinting content doesn’t seem to be a moral issue for Perplexity. Shevelenko said, “There are subtleties of fair use and copyright where we feel like we’re kind of, you know, clearly within those boundaries.”
Whether it’s a way to redeem itself or not, Perplexity seems determined to build a long-term infrastructure to compensate publishers for their content — at least for as long as the company exists. Shevelenko himself said: “Obviously, I don’t see that happening. But let’s say Perplexity dies and fails. You don’t lose anything, do you? And if we succeed, you benefit.”
AI-powered search is more expensive than traditional search, so Perplexity has to work quickly to cover the computational costs involved. In May, the startup raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation. “We need advertising to be successful because it’s going to be our main business model,” Shevelenko said.
Paying publishers only increases costs, and Perplexity is aware that it’s not the norm for a search tool. “By the way, our investors don’t like us doing that because they say, ‘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 said, the company wants to focus on building a profitable business by forming alliances with media outlets and creating the right long-term structures, such as sharing ad revenue.
There’s also the looming threat of OpenAI, which just announced a prototype of its AI-powered search product, SearchGPT, alongside its own publisher partners like News Corp, AtlanticAnd The edgeOpenAI has also acknowledged Perplexity’s mistakes. In its announcement, the company said that publishers will have the ability to “manage how they appear in OpenAI’s search features” and will be able to opt out of using their content to train OpenAI’s models while still remaining visible in search.
Shevelenko said Perplexity is “happy to give publishers full control over this,” but “as long as it doesn’t make the product ugly.” For now, offering that control is a “work in progress.” More importantly, Perplexity wants to avoid giving publishers the ability to edit answers.
It seems that 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 Atlanticwho recently struck a deal with OpenAI, said in an episode of The edge‘s Decoder that they weighed all the benefits of a partnership against what it would cost to continue and what they would get out of it, “and then you make a choice.”
So if Perplexity wants to pay publishers a check for using their content, I think that’s a good thing, actually. But it doesn’t answer a lot of questions, like what it means for publishers who don’t get a check or whether the deals will represent meaningful resources for newsrooms.