Perplexity says it will give publishers 80% cut of new subscription product's revenue
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Perplexity on Monday said it would launch a new subscription product called Comet Plus that gives participating publishers an 80% cut of all revenue earned from subscription fees.
Why it matters: Perplexity wants to play nice with publishers, but its new product will need significant user adoption to ensure its media partners reap meaningful rewards.
- Its new offering comes as publishers eye new ways to structure deals with AI companies around usage rather than upfront blanket payments.
How it works: To start, Perplexity has set aside a $42.5 million pool to compensate early publishing partners that participate in the program, Perplexity's head of publisher partnerships Jessica Chan told Axios.
- That money comes from proceeds of sales of Comet Plus as well as sales of Perplexity's existing "Pro" and "Max" subscription products, which will include Comet Plus access for free moving forward.
- In the future, publishers will receive 80% of all revenue from subscriptions to Comet Plus, which will cost users $5 monthly. (Perplexity will retain 20% of the revenue to account for computing costs.)
- Publishing partners will receive a cut from the broader pool depending on the volume of traffic each publisher's content drives, whether that traffic comes from Comet search browser results or articles highlighted by Perplexity's Comet Assistant.
Catch up quick: Comet is Perplexity's first effort to formalize a publisher product after launching a broader publisher payment program across its products last year.
- That program — which has dozens of current partners and pays publishers through ad revenue share, enterprise rewards and API access — will continue, Chan said. She hopes current participants will join the new Comet Plus program.
The big picture: In the traditional search era, publishers were incentivized to produce content that ranked high on algorithms promoted by search browsers. That model, Chan said, provided perverse quality incentives.
- Perplexity, she said, is trying to remove guesswork around revenue and reliance on random traffic that forces publishers to try to game the system with clickbait content. "We're really offering more of a transparent payment for participation."
Zoom out: Perplexity's push to compensate publishers comes as it faces several copyright lawsuits.
- Japanese media giants Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun jointly sued Perplexity on Tuesday, citing copyright infringement.
- Last week a federal judge ruled News Corp.'s lawsuit against the company could proceed.
- Other outlets, such as Condé Nast and BBC have sent Perplexity cease and desist letters asking it to stop using their content for algorithm training.
What to watch: Perplexity earlier this month made a $34.5 billion bid for Google's Chrome browser, which is by far the most-used internet browser globally.
- Chan called it a "very serious bid" and said the company is committed to keeping Chrome's underlying source code, Chromium, open source.
- Asked whether the company would want to introduce a new type of revenue share for publishers on Chrome — similar to what it's rolling out with Comet — if it won the bid, Chan said, "We'll evaluate all of the best options" as well as "continued investments in this in this publisher program as well."
