Perplexity unveils revenue sharing plan for publishers

Perplexity will begin its revenue-sharing program with publishers with six publishing partners, though ads won’t appear until later this year. 

The program will see Perplexity pay website owners for every source link in search results with ads running. Perplexity first announced the program during VentureBeat Transform 2024 earlier this month. 

Perplexity chief product officer Dmitry Shevelenko told VentureBeat in an interview that the company wanted to lay the groundwork for revenue sharing now even if advertising on the platform will only begin in the second half of 2024. 

“We’re trying to do something that no tech platform has ever done, which is revenue sharing,” Shevelenko said. “We’re in a unique position to be able to do this because we’re just starting our advertising business, which is our main revenue engine. If Google wanted to do this, it’d be very painful for them.” 

The first batch of publishers to participate in the program are Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress parent company Automattic. Shevelenko said the deal with Automattic only includes WordPress. 

How the revenue sharing works

The company will give a flat percentage of revenue it gets from running ads to publishers in its upcoming “Keep Exploring” feature. The new feature lets brands “pay to ask specific related follow-up questions in our answer engine” and on Pages. To facilitate this, Perplexity will give publishing partners access to ScalePost.ai’s analytics platform to track how and when their links are cited. 

The publications will get free access to Perplexity’s APIs, which will let publishers create chatbots on their websites. The APIs will also integrate with the “Keep Exploring” feature, so brands can still run ads in stories. Perplexity will give partners free accounts for all of their employees to use Perplexity Enterprise Pro, its secure enterprise search platform. 

Perplexity said in a press release that it is open to “other types of collaborations with publishers in the future” which could include bundled subscriptions where Perplexity Pro users can also get subscriptions to the publications. 

The company said it updated how its systems index websites and cites sources, which comes after Perplexity got into hot water for allegedly ignoring opt-outs in robots.txt on websites like Wired and getting called a bullshit engine. Condé Nast, publisher of Wired, has since sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, reported The Information. Platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been criticized for hallucinating links to websites that the chatbots cite.  

Perplexity’s announcement comes after OpenAI released SearchGPT, a prototype search engine to a small group of publications and users. SearchGPT does not have a revenue-sharing program (yet), but OpenAI has made several deals with media companies like News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, which owns The Verge, New York Magazine and Vox.com, and the storied magazine The Atlantic. OpenAI said it will prominently cite and link to publishers on SearchGPT to direct user traffic towards their websites.