Perplexity Introduces Exciting Revenue Sharing Program for Publishers

Perplexity is set to launch its revenue-sharing program with six publishing partners, although advertisements will not appear until later this year.

In this innovative program, Perplexity will compensate website owners for every link referenced in search results with running ads. The announcement was made at the Transform 2024 media event earlier this month.

Perplexity’s Chief Product Officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, emphasized the company's commitment to establishing this revenue-sharing model now, despite ads debuting only in the latter half of 2024. “Our goal is to implement a unique revenue-sharing approach that no tech platform has undertaken before,” Shevelenko stated. “We're in a privileged position to do this because we're launching our advertising business, which serves as our primary revenue source. For Google, this would be a complex endeavor.”

The initial publishing partners include Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, although the partnership with Automattic pertains only to WordPress.

How the Revenue Sharing Works

Perplexity will allocate a fixed percentage of the ad revenue generated through its new “Keep Exploring” feature to participating publishers. This feature allows brands to pay for the ability to ask relevant follow-up questions in the Perplexity answer engine and on dedicated Pages. To streamline this process, Perplexity will provide its publishing partners access to ScalePost.ai’s analytics platform, enabling them to monitor link citations and their performance.

Additionally, participating publications will receive complimentary access to Perplexity’s APIs, which will empower them to create chatbots on their own websites. These APIs will also work with the “Keep Exploring” feature to facilitate ad placements within stories. To further support their partners, Perplexity will offer all employees of partnering publications free accounts to its secure enterprise search tool, Perplexity Enterprise Pro.

Perplexity indicated it is open to exploring additional collaborations with publishers in the future, which may include bundled subscriptions allowing Perplexity Pro users to access their publications.

Following criticism for allegedly disregarding website opt-out requests, including those from Wired, Perplexity has made updates to its indexing system and source citation methods. This comes in response to backlash from Condé Nast, publisher of Wired, which has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity. Other platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT have faced scrutiny for inaccurately citing links to various websites.

Perplexity’s announcement coincides with OpenAI’s release of SearchGPT, a prototype search engine currently available to a select group of publications and users. While SearchGPT does not yet feature a revenue-sharing program, OpenAI has partnered with media entities such as News Corp., Vox Media, and The Atlantic, pledging to prominently cite and link to publishers in order to direct traffic to their sites.