Perplexity is launching a program that allows traditional media companies to collect the share of revenue generated by articles on AI platforms. This is a move that appears to be an attempt to dodge legal action from industry giants.
According to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, the Jeff Bezos-backed startup has secured $42.5 million distributed to the program's publishers.
“AI helps create better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” Srinivas told Bloomberg.
“So I think this is actually a good solution and I'm happy to adjust it along the way.”
Perplexity plans to fund the program with revenue from Comet Plus, a new subscription tier for web browsers. Comet Plus costs $5 a month and, like Apple's Apple News+ offering, it produces curated content from publishers affiliated with Perplexity, Srinivas said.
Publishers enjoy 80% of the comet and revenue, and take away the rest.
The media industry is fussing over Google's AI-generated summaries and Openai's ChatGpt that appear at the top of Chrome's search results, claiming that the bot has reduced web traffic to its site.
Last week, a federal court in New York rejected a confused bid to dismiss the case from Newscorp (the Newscorp and Dow Jones, which own the post).
Forbes and Condé Nast confusingly sent a suspension and assumed letter, accusing them of using the content without permission.
“We are confident that AI companies will win all of these lawsuits,” bewildered spokesman Jesse Dwyer told Bloomberg.
“We look forward to solving this law about this so that everyone can benefit from AI.”
Confusion did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the post.
Meanwhile, cybersecurity company CloudFlare has accused them of stumping them of raw web and swiping data from a website by slipping through around software blocks.
Perplexity argues that because AI assistants are not actively raw the web, they are accessing the website at user's request, they need different rules to follow.
Srinivas said people use AI agents to “go to something on their behalf and read something, it's different from Web Crawler.”
Under the new program, when content receives traffic through Perplexity's Comet web browser, publishers make money when it appears in Comet's queries or is used to complete tasks by Comet's AI assistant.
Perplexity is working on its own AI-powered search engine, as it hopes to rival Google's Chrome.
Traditional media that relies on web traffic and clicks to keep clicks to keep your business running on “old models,” says Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnership at Perplexity.
“We just want to create a new standard for compensation,” she told Bloomberg.
Several AI Giants, including Openai and Google, concluded by licensing and distributing multi-million dollar deals with publishers, but are the first to offer this revenue share program.
Chang said it's unclear which publishers are signing up, but that the confusion is being discussed with his former partner. This is a group that includes Time Magazine, Los Angeles Times and Fortune Magazine.
Like many other AI startups, Prperxity continues to raise a ton of funds, bringing in $100 million at a valuation of $100 million last month.
Recently, I offered to pay $34.5 billion to take over Google's Chrome browser. This is hoping that the US government will sell web tools to Google to dissolve the company.
Srinivas said the offer was legal and was “wealthy people who want to support us.”
He said the confusion had not yet heard a reply from Google.
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comments on the post.
