Perplexity is opening up a pool of $42.5 million to publishers. As part of a new subscription model called Comet Plus, publishers can now get paid from direct, crawler and AI agent traffic through Perplexity’s AI-powered web browser Comet.
The company created the new model based on feedback from publishers that are already part of Perplexity’s ad revenue share program, Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships, told Digiday. Publishers in its program include Blavity, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Gannett, The Independent and Time.
Here’s how it works: Revenue from Perplexity’s subscriptions (Pro, Max and the new $5 tier Comet Plus, first reported by Bloomberg) gets pooled. Perplexity keeps 20% of it, and the other 80% will go to participants in Perplexity’s publisher program. Revenue is divvied up based on three categories: direct visits to publisher’s sites by people browsing using Comet, when publisher content is cited as an answer search queries on Comet and when content is used to complete tasks by Comet’s AI assistant. Perplexity is one of the first AI companies to pay publishers based on content usage.
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