Perplexity AI Launches Revenue Sharing Program Amid Plagiarism Allegations

Perplexity AI starts ad-revenue sharing partnership after weeks of plagiarism allegations

AI search startup Perplexity has launched a revenue-sharing model for publishers after a constant stream of plagiarism accusations. Several media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and Wordpress.com will be a part of the firm's 'Publishers Program.' Earlier in June, media companies like Forbes and Wired had found Perplexity AI plagiarising versions of their stories that were behind the paywall. The stories landed up on the firm's new Pages tool with no citation made to the source. An investigation by Wired found that an IP address that could be "almost certainly" linked to Perplexity and wasn't listed on its public IP page had visited the outlet's websites more than 800 times within a three-month period. The startup raised around $62 billion in a new funding round earlier in April pushing their valuation to more than $1 billion, twice more than from three months before. (For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today's Cache) Besides, publishers will also get a free one-year subscription to Perplexity's Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity's developer tools along with insights via Scalepost.ai another AI startup, for on data around how often their articles show up on user queries. Perplexity AI adds feature to turn research into AI reports A CNBC report stated that Perplexity's goal was to have 30 publishers on board by the end of the year. The startup also was looking to partner with ad sales teams of the publishers so that they could sell ads "against all Perplexity inventory." OpenAI has inked several such deals with companies like News Corp. and Time magazine sometime back to ward off similar copyright allegations. Read Comments

Perplexity AI will share revenue with publishers after plagiarism accusations

Perplexity AI logo is seen in this illustration taken January 4, 2024. Perplexity AI on Tuesday debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers, after more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media outlets and content platforms like Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com are the first to join the company's "Publishers Program." The announcement follows an onslaught of controversy in June, when Forbes said it found a plagiarized version of its paywalled original reporting within Perplexity AI's Pages tool, with no reference to the media outlet besides a small "F" logo at the bottom of the page. Weeks later, Wired said it also found evidence of Perplexity plagiarizing Wired stories, and reported that an IP address "almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range" visited its parent company's websites more than 800 times in a three-month span. The artificial intelligence startup, which specializes in AI-assisted search and aims to compete with Google, raised new funding in April at a valuation exceeding $1 billion -- doubling its valuation from three months before. Under the new partner program, any time a user asks a question and Perplexity generates revenue from citing one of the publisher's articles in its answer, Perplexity will share a flat percentage of that revenue. That percentage counts on a per-article basis, Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, told CNBC in an interview -- meaning that if three articles from one publisher were used in one answer, the partner would receive "triple the revenue share." Shevelenko confirmed that the flat rate is a double-digit percentage but declined to provide specifics. Shevelenko told CNBC that more than a dozen publishers, including "major newspaper dailies and companies that own them," had reached out with interest less than two hours after the program debuted. The company's goal, he said, is to have 30 publishers enrolled by the end of the year, and Perplexity is looking to partner with some of the publishers' ad sales teams so they can sell ads "against all Perplexity inventory." "When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher's content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share," Perplexity wrote in a blog post, adding that the company will offer publishers API credits and also work with ScalePost.ai to provide analytics to provide "deeper insights into how Perplexity cites their content." Shevelenko told CNBC that Perplexity began engaging with publishers in January and solidified ideas for how its revenue-sharing program would work later in the first quarter of 2024. He said five Perplexity employees were dedicated to working on the program. "Some of it grew out of conversations we were having with publishers about integrating Perplexity APIs and technology into their products," Shevelenko said. Perplexity's new program comes amid an increasingly heated battle between AI startups and some media outlets and creators, as many publications aggressively try to protect their businesses in the age of AI-generated content. In June, The Center for Investigative Reporting, the country's oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and lead backer Microsoft in federal court for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. A group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT. But not all news organizations are gearing up for a fight, and some are instead joining forces with AI startups like OpenAI, Perplexity and others. OpenAI and Time magazine announced in June a "multi-year content deal" that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time's history. OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May with News Corp., allowing the company to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's, the New York Post and other publications.

AI search engine accused of plagiarism announces publisher revenue-sharing plan

Perplexity says WordPress, TIME, Der Spiegel, and Fortune have already signed up. On Tuesday, AI-powered search engine Perplexity unveiled a new revenue-sharing program for publishers, marking a significant shift in its approach to third-party content use, reports CNBC. The move comes after plagiarism allegations from major media outlets, including Forbes, Wired, and Ars parent company Condé Nast. Perplexity, valued at over $1 billion, aims to compete with search giant Google. Further Reading "To further support the vital work of media organizations and online creators, we need to ensure publishers can thrive as Perplexity grows," writes the company in a blog post announcing the problem. "That's why we're excited to announce the Perplexity Publishers Program and our first batch of partners: TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com." Under the program, Perplexity will share a percentage of ad revenue with publishers when their content is cited in AI-generated answers. The revenue share applies on a per-article basis and potentially multiplies if articles from a single publisher are used in one response. Some content providers, such as WordPress.com, plan to pass some of that revenue on to content creators. A press release from WordPress.com states that joining Perplexity's Publishers Program allows WordPress.com content to appear in Perplexity's "Keep Exploring" section on their Discover pages. "That means your articles will be included in their search index and your articles can be surfaced as an answer on their answer engine and Discover feed," the blog company writes. "If your website is referenced in a Perplexity search result where the company earns advertising revenue, you'll be eligible for revenue share." Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, told CNBC that the company began discussions with publishers in January, with program details solidified in early 2024. He reported strong initial interest, with over a dozen publishers reaching out within hours of the announcement. As part of the program, publishers will also receive access to Perplexity APIs that can be used to create custom "answer engines" and "Enterprise Pro" accounts that provide "enhanced data privacy and security capabilities" for all employees of Publishers in the program for one year. Accusations of plagiarism The revenue-sharing announcement follows a rocky month for the AI startup. In mid-June, Forbes reported finding its content within Perplexity's Pages tool with minimal attribution. Pages allows Perplexity users to curate content and share it with others. Ars Technica sister publication Wired later made similar claims, also noting suspicious traffic patterns from IP addresses likely linked to Perplexity that were ignoring robots.txt exclusions. Perplexity was also found to be manipulating its crawling bots' ID string to get around website blocks. Further Reading As part of company policy, Ars Technica parent Condé Nast disallows AI-based content scrapers, and its CEO Roger Lynch testified in the US Senate earlier this year that generative AI has been built with "stolen goods." Condé sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity earlier this month. But publisher trouble might not be Perplexity's only problem. In some tests of the search we performed in February, Perplexity badly confabulated certain answers, even when citations were readily available. Since our initial tests, the accuracy of Perplexity's results seems to have improved, but providing inaccurate answers (which also plagued Google's AI Overviews search feature) is still a potential issue. Compared to the free tier of service, Perplexity users who pay $20 per month can access more capable LLMs such as GPT-4o and Claude 3, so the quality and accuracy of the output can vary dramatically depending on whether a user subscribes or not. The addition of citations to every Perplexity answer allows users to check accuracy -- if they take the time to do it. The move by Perplexity occurs against a backdrop of tensions between AI companies and content creators. Some media outlets, such as The New York Times, have filed lawsuits against AI vendors like OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the training of large language models. OpenAI has struck media licensing deals with many publishers as a way to secure access to high-quality training data and avoid future lawsuits. In this case, Perplexity is not using the licensed articles and content to train AI models but is seeking legal permission to reproduce content from publishers on its website.

AI search startup Perplexity launches revenue sharing program for publishers - SiliconANGLE

AI search startup Perplexity launches revenue sharing program for publishers Perplexity AI Inc., a well-funded startup with an artificial intelligence search engine, today launched a revenue sharing program for publishers. The company's search engine incorporates information from news articles into the prompt responses it generates. Under the new revenue sharing program, publishers will receive compensation when Perplexity makes money from prompt responses based on their articles. The program is rolling out a few weeks after Forbes accused the company of plagiarizing some of its content in search results. San Francisco-based Perplexity is backed by more than $165 million in funding. It provides a search engine that doesn't display a standard list of webpages in response to queries, but rather generates a natural language text snippet that directly answers the user's question. It also lends itself to other tasks such as solving math problems. Perplexity generates revenue with a paid version of the search engine that generates more detailed responses than the free edition. A few months from now, the company plans to add a second revenue stream in the form of an advertising service. The service will allow brands to display promotions below the answers that Perplexity's search engine generates in response to user questions. Under the revenue-sharing program announced today, publishers will receive a flat fee when their content is used in search results that generate ad revenue for Perplexity. CNBC reported that the company plans to pay a double-digit percentage of ad revenue for each news article cited by its search engine. When an AI query response references multiple articles from the same publisher, the publisher is separately compensated for each. In addition to a cut of ad sales, participating newspapers will receive a free one-year subscription to the paid version of Perplexity's search engine. The company will also provide access to its application programming interfaces along with technical support. Perplexity envisions publishers using the APIs to embed its search engine into their websites. "We structured this program to ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties," said Perplexity Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas. The program is rolling out a few weeks after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing one of its paywalled articles in a search result. Shortly thereafter, Wired reported that the search startup collects content from websites even if their robots.txt records indicate they wish to opt out of scraping. Moreover, the report found that one of the crawlers used by Perplexity is seemingly configured to avoid websites' blocking attempts. The company is seeking to sign up 30 publishers to its new revenue-sharing program by year's end. The initial participants include Der Spiegel, Entrepreneur, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, TIME and Automattic Inc., the developer of WordPress. Automatic provides a hosting service called WordPress.com that powers a large number of websites, some of which contain content relevant for Perplexity's search engine.

AI Startup Perplexity Partners With Time, Fortune After Plagiarism Claims

Perplexity AI is launching revenue-sharing partnerships with several major publishers less than two months after some news outlets publicly accused the artificial intelligence startup of plagiarizing their stories. Perplexity, which offers an AI search engine to compete with Alphabet Inc.'s Google, announced Tuesday that it has struck deals with Time, Fortune, WordPress.com-owner Automattic and several other media companies. Publishers will receive a "double digit" percentage of revenue from sponsored questions that appear below results in the search app, Perplexity's Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told Bloomberg News. Perplexity doesn't currently have advertising in its core product, but the startup plans to introduce it in the coming months.

Perplexity unveils revenue sharing plan for publishers

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Perplexity will begin its revenue-sharing program with publishers with six publishing partners, though ads won't appear until later this year. The program will see Perplexity pay website owners for every source link in search results with ads running. Perplexity first announced the program during VentureBeat Transform 2024 earlier this month. Perplexity chief product officer Dmitry Shevelenko told VentureBeat in an interview that the company wanted to lay the groundwork for revenue sharing now even if advertising on the platform will only begin in the second half of 2024. "We're trying to do something that no tech platform has ever done, which is revenue sharing," Shevelenko said. "We're in a unique position to be able to do this because we're just starting our advertising business, which is our main revenue engine. If Google wanted to do this, it'd be very painful for them." The first batch of publishers to participate in the program are Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress parent company Automattic. Shevelenko said the deal with Automattic only includes WordPress. How the revenue sharing works The company will give a flat percentage of revenue it gets from running ads to publishers in its upcoming "Keep Exploring" feature. The new feature lets brands "pay to ask specific related follow-up questions in our answer engine" and on Pages. To facilitate this, Perplexity will give publishing partners access to ScalePost.ai's analytics platform to track how and when their links are cited. The publications will get free access to Perplexity's APIs, which will let publishers create chatbots on their websites. The APIs will also integrate with the "Keep Exploring" feature, so brands can still run ads in stories. Perplexity will give partners free accounts for all of their employees to use Perplexity Enterprise Pro, its secure enterprise search platform. Perplexity said in a press release that it is open to "other types of collaborations with publishers in the future" which could include bundled subscriptions where Perplexity Pro users can also get subscriptions to the publications. The company said it updated how its systems index websites and cites sources, which comes after Perplexity got into hot water for allegedly ignoring opt-outs in robots.txt on websites like Wired and getting called a bullshit engine. Condé Nast, publisher of Wired, has since sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, reported The Information. Platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI's ChatGPT have been criticized for hallucinating links to websites that the chatbots cite. Perplexity's announcement comes after OpenAI released SearchGPT, a prototype search engine to a small group of publications and users. SearchGPT does not have a revenue-sharing program (yet), but OpenAI has made several deals with media companies like News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, which owns The Verge, New York Magazine and Vox.com, and the storied magazine The Atlantic. OpenAI said it will prominently cite and link to publishers on SearchGPT to direct user traffic towards their websites.

Nvidia-backed Perplexity AI inks deal with publishers to put ads in search engine

Artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI, which is backed by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and several other investors, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a deal with several publishers to split advertising revenue amid accusations of plagiarism by the tech company. As part of its Perplexity Publishers' Program, Perplexity is partnering with TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com to feature their content in response to user's search queries. In conjunction, the publishers will get a cut of the ad revenue associated with the queries. The publishers will get a one-year subscription to Perplexity's Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity's developer tools. "The Internet ecosystem is evolving, and we want this program to grow and adapt," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. "We're open to other types of collaborations with publishers in the future, such as bundled subscriptions, where users could pay a flat fee for both Perplexity Pro and subscriptions to participating publishers." "We structured this program to ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said. "We appreciate the publishers who have joined us for this program and provided us with valuable feedback about how it should operate. We have always believed that we can build a system where the whole Internet wins, and this is just the first step." Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, told The Verge that "it's a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero." Perplexity's AI product, Pages, which lets users create reports, has been accused by both Forbes and Wired of plagiarism. OpenAI creator ChatGPT has partnered with several media companies for training purposes. In April, it was reported that Perplexity was planning to raise at least $250M, at a valuation in the range of $2.5B to $3B. More on artificial intelligence Nvidia: It's Possible For The AI/Quality Compounder Momentum To Get More Extreme Google Q2: Is AI Worth It? If Nvidia Doesn't Rally This Week, Major Bust Could Be Underway (Technical Analysis) OpenAI's SearchGPT likely to remain an 'overhang' on Google in near-term: Wedbush Monolithic Power Systems in focus as Rosenblatt ups target on Nvidia boost

Perplexity brings ads to AI search, revenue-sharing with publishers

Perplexity will soon begin to pay publishers when their content is used to form a specific type of the AI search engine's answers. The business modell revolves around a revenue share from ad sales, an approach that marks a new chapter for the upstart AI company. Ads have long been a deeply integrated part of Google search results, but building ad inventory into new AI search answers is a new frontier. Google, for example, runs ads alongside its AI Overviews answers, but not within them. Perplexity, by contrast, never served ads with its search results. Until now. Starting later this quarter, Perplexity will let brands buy "related follow-up questions" that will appear below the initial answer to a user query. The questions will be clearly labeled as sponsored, Perplexity says. The brand will pay Perplexity a certain (undisclosed) fee for every thousand user views of the sponsored question. When a publisher's content is used in Perplexity's answer to the sponsored question, it earns a "double digit" percentage of ad revenue, Perplexity says.