Perplexity has cooked up a brand new method to pay publishers for his or her content material

Perplexity is launching a brand new revenue-sharing plan for publishers that may pay them each time its AI assistants use an article to reply a query, The Wall Street Journal reports. Perplexity is launching the plan (and partially paying for it) with a brand new Comet Plus subscription that provides subscribers entry “to premium content material from a bunch of trusted publishers and journalists.”

Comet Plus prices $5 monthly, and based mostly on Perplexity’s description, it is primarily designed to account for the actions its Comet Agent (included within the Comet browser) takes on web sites, which are not thought of in present writer offers. “Once you ask Perplexity to synthesize current protection of an trade pattern, that is listed site visitors,” the corporate writes. “When Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles related to your day’s conferences, that is agent site visitors.”

The corporate’s existing Publisher Program, which counts publications like TIME and Fortune as contributors, shares advert income based mostly on the site visitors a Perplexity search is stealing away by offering a abstract of an article. The cash shared by means of Comet Plus will presumably account for what’s misplaced when an AI agent visits a webpage in your behalf, zooming previous adverts you’d usually see or hear.

Publishers will get 80 % of the income of Comet Plus, in keeping with Perplexity, with the remaining 20 % allotted to “compute.” The Wall Avenue Journal writes that Perplexity will initially pay collaborating publishers out of a “$42.5 million income pool” that may broaden over time, presumably as sign-ups develop for Comet Plus, and the Comet internet browser turns into out there to extra folks. That beginning sum doubtless takes under consideration Perplexity’s present Professional and Max subscribers, who will obtain Comet Plus as a part of their subscriptions and are paying into the revenue-sharing scheme by default.

It sounds beneficiant on its face, and perhaps with a big sufficient quantity of subscribers will probably be, however 80 % of $5 is $4. That is $4 that may presumably unlock limitless entry to a publication’s complete library of content material. Most newspapers cost anyplace from $20 to $30 monthly to entry all of their articles. Why would they accept much less?

It isn’t clear if this plan replaces Perplexity’s present Writer Program, or will exist alongside it. It is also laborious to say if not paying for Comet Plus will change the standard of responses you obtain in Comet or Perplexity. Engadget has contacted Perplexity for extra data and can replace this text if we hear again.

Perplexity doubtless would not be exploring new revenue-sharing plans if it hadn’t already been caught plagiarizing articles within the first place. The corporate needs its agentic browser to be a hit, and that ideally requires a certain quantity of participation from the individuals who create the articles, pictures, and movies brokers browse. It stays to be seen if Comet Plus is the sort of association that may make publishers play ball.