Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage.
AI chatbot Perplexity will soon launch a revenue-sharing program with web publishers, as announced during VB Transform on Thursday. Dmitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer at Perplexity, explained that this program will involve advertisements displayed alongside search queries on the platform. Publishers who contribute source content for these answers will receive a share of the revenue generated from these ads.
This revenue-sharing will apply to links and search results across the entire Perplexity platform, including both its free service and the paid Perplexity Pro option. Partners will earn a percentage of revenue from every ad displayed against their content. If a partner’s website link is used, they will receive a share of the revenue.
Perplexity had previously discussed plans to run ads against its question-and-answer results back in April, with Shevelenko indicating that advertising on the platform would commence in the next quarter. The revenue-sharing initiative will involve major publishers and will also be available to individuals with WordPress sites or newsletters. However, further specifics about the program and the initial publishing partners weren’t disclosed.
The chatbot has become well-known for its search-based product offerings and has significantly increased its traffic referrals. In April, the company raised $63 million, reaching a valuation of over a billion dollars. Since its launch, Perplexity has added new features, including “Pages,” which allows users to create web pages from search-based information.
Despite its success, Perplexity has faced criticism. Forbes filed a lawsuit against the company for alleged copyright infringement, and Wired accused it of ignoring opt-outs in their robots.txt file. Nieman Labs reported that chatbots like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT sometimes provide inaccurate information and fictitious links.
Shevelenko addressed these criticisms by stating that the claims of infringement were incorrect. He emphasized that Perplexity has always included source links in its responses and had been developing the revenue-sharing program prior to any criticism about ignoring content opt-outs.
He also highlighted that the issues of content aggregation and citation have existed long before AI and stated that AI does not fundamentally change these dynamics. Additionally, he pointed out that Perplexity doesn’t train its own foundational model and is not involved in internet scraping to train such models.