Perplexity AI will get ads and share revenue with publishers

Perplexity will start embedding ads within its AI search engine and share revenue with publishers. The Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) platform has been facing publishers’ ire for allegedly scraping data without permission.

Perplexity Publishers’ Program will share revenue for ads

Perplexity, a two-year-old AI search engine, currently valued at over $3 billion, has initiated a Perplexity Publishers’ Program. As part of the program, Perplexity will start posting ads and share some of the revenue with partnering publishers.

The Perplexity Publishers’ Program will launch at the end of September. The AI search engine is backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA.

Perplexity recently faced intense backlash from leading online publishers including Forbes, Condé Nast, and others for allegedly scraping content without permission. If that’s not concerning enough, the Gen AI search engine may have ignored “Robots.txt”, which is a simple file that warns page-crawling bots to steer clear of the website.

｢ this is how @perplexity_ai ads will work ｣

– brands pay for ads-based follow up questions
– users click on them
– if a publisher is mentioned in the answer, then the publisher gets paid

so some of the brand’s ad budget is redirected to publishers, while PP is gets a fee https://t.co/bb2iBJrrjM

— Pavel Larionov (@pa1ar) July 30, 2024

The Perplexity Publishers’ Program reportedly includes TIME, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel, and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

Needless to say, most of the publishers around the world fear the impact of Gen AI on their traffic and revenue. Perplexity AI, in particular, is perceived as a direct threat because of how it operates.

The Perplexity search engine crawls through the internet and gathers information from multiple sources, including online publishers. It then synthesizes an answer using Gen AI. Simply put, visitors to Perplexity need not visit the websites from which the search engine has obtained the content.

How much will publishers earn?

It is important to note that Perplexity does not train its own AI models. It lets users pick their preferred AI LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Meta’s Llama 3.1. Perplexity’s Gen AI subsequently summarizes answers from the web.

To support the work of media organizations and creators, we need to ensure publishers can thrive as Perplexity grows. We’re excited about the program and our first batch of partners: TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and https://t.co/zt9fIqutMd.

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) July 30, 2024

Neither Perplexity nor its partnering publishers have divulged how much revenue the AI company is sharing. However, Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s chief business officer, indicated it would be a “meaningful double-digit percentage shared back with the publishers that contributed source input to the answer.”

It is not clear if Perplexity’s revenue-sharing model would have any meaningful impact to cover the revenue lost due to declining traffic. Moreover, the AI search company’s revenue would largely depend on ads and how well it monetizes the content on its platform.