What is the Perplexity Publishers’ Program and How it is Beneficial for Publishers?

Recently, the artificial intelligence (AI)– powered search engine, Perplexity AI announced the Perplexity Publishers Program. The program is designed to support media organizations and online publishers while enhancing the quality and credibility of answers provided by Perplexity. 

This announcement comes a few months after the search engine faced an onslaught of complaints from some of the top media outlets. Earlier this year in June, Forbes discovered that one of its paywalled original articles had been copied and posted on Perplexity AI’s Pages tool without credit. There was only a small “F” logo at the bottom as a reference to the media outlet. 

A few weeks later, Wired also found that Perplexity had used its content without proper attribution. Additionally, Wired reported that an IP address, likely associated with Perplexity but not publicly listed, had accessed its parent company’s websites over 800 times in three months.

In a blog post, Perplexity AI announced that their “first batch of partners” for the Perplexity Publishers Program are TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com.

The post says that the program is “a significant move towards aligning the interests of AI technology and quality journalism. We’re excited about the potential of this program to support the future of digital publishing and to ensure that high-quality, trustworthy content remains at the heart of the AI-powered information landscape.”

Let’s learn a little bit more about the program.

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What is the Perplexity Publishers Program?

In simple words, Perplexity’s Publishers Program is a revenue-sharing initiative designed to compensate media publishers for the use of their content in Perplexity’s search engine responses. The key features of the initiative are: 

1. Revenue Sharing: Perplexity intends to launch advertising via a “related questions” function, in which brands can pay to ask particular follow-up questions. When a user interacts with Perplexity and includes content from a publisher, the publisher receives a share of the revenue generated through that engagement.
2. Access to Perplexity’s APIs: Partners in the initiative will get free access to Perplexity’s Online Large Language Model (LLM) APIs and developer support. It also allows publishers to develop unique response engines on their own websites, where visitors can ask questions and receive answers that only include the publisher’s content.
3. Enterprise Pro for Employees: For a year, Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro service will be free for every employee of the participating publisher partners. This version improves data privacy and security and is a useful tool for research and fact-checking.

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How is it Beneficial for Businesses?

The Perplexity Publishers Program offers numerous benefits that can prove to be helpful for different media organizations. Let’s take a look at them:

• New Revenue Streams: The revenue-sharing model offers publishers a new stream of revenue. It will be especially useful for financially challenged businesses. By monetizing their content through Perplexity, publishers can broaden their sources of income and support their operations.

• Increased Visibility: By partnering with Perplexity in the program, publishers can ensure that their content appears in the AI-powered search engine’s response. This exposure can result in more traffic to their websites, more brand recognition, and a wider demographic reach.

• Enhanced User Engagement: The combination of Perplexity’s related questions technology and custom response engines enable publishers to provide a more interactive and engaging experience for their readers. This can help keep readers on their websites for longer and encourage repeat visits.

• Support for Quality Journalism: The initiative emphasizes the value of high-quality, truthful journalism. This collaboration with trusted media providers is a way to underscore the importance of reliable information, benefiting both publishers and the general public.

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The Bottom Line

The Perplexity Publishers Program is a decent initiative to begin a fight against plagiarism, fake content, copyright infringement, and other challenges that media outlets have started facing since the inception of AI-generated content. 

Aravind Srinivas, the company’s CEO says, “We structured this program to ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties. 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.”

It is unclear if other top publishers, such as Forbes, Bloomberg, or Wired, will join forces with Perplexity, given their (some of them) grievances with the search engine.

Aravind Srinivas Net Worth, CEO of Perplexity AI