Perplexity wants to involve publishers when content is used

The question of content and the financing of content drives AI providers and content creators of all stripes in equal measure. Now Perplexity wants to involve publishers as soon as their content is used to answer queries in the AI browser Comet and the AI search. CEO Aravind Srinivas has stated from the outset that the aim is to create a new payment system. He is aware that publishers need to be paid.

Specifically, 42.5 million US dollars are to be provided by Perplexity, which can be distributed among publishers. The money comes from the revenue generated by subscriptions to the Comet Plus browser. Customers have to pay 5 US dollars a month and then receive full access to the browser functions as well as curated news and content from Perplexity's publishing partners. According to the plan, 80 percent of the revenue goes to the publishers and Perplexity keeps 20 percent.

OpenAI and Google, on the other hand, have not agreed to participate in the actual use of publishers' content, but have made multi-million dollar agreements with individual publishers that allow them to use content as they see fit. When introducing AI in the Bing search engine, Microsoft also originally spoke of wanting to give content creators a share of the revenue. However, nothing of the sort is known to date.

The crucial question of AI and web content

With Perplexity, publishers also have to join a partner program in order to be remunerated. It is known that the Times, Los Angeles Times, Fortune and also Der Spiegel from Germany are involved. Some time ago it was said that Perplexity was starting to give partners a share of the advertising revenue. This concerned search. Now it is also about the browser and subscription revenues.

At the same time, Perplexity is facing lawsuits from publishers. Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and Condé Nast, for example, are complaining that the AI search engine uses their articles to respond to users without paying – either for real-time search and use or for content used to train the AI models. There are also accusations that Perplexity ignores the robots txt file. This regulates which content may be used in a machine-readable form and is intended to exclude crawlers that access content. Perplexity argues that it does not send out crawlers in general, but that certain pages are accessed at the request of a user. The rules for crawlers would therefore not apply.

(emw)