Last year in July Perplexity introduced this revenue sharing program in beta! But on 25th August recently they have launched Comet Plus subscription and along with that shared their vision of how web & its business model should operate in this AI and Agentic bots browsing the web on behalf of real human users.
And along with the announcement of this Comet Plus subscription Perplexity also put out some information about revenue sharing with publishers and said they are going to share $42.5 million with publishers. From the earlier reports and everything it seemed like its going to be a limited sort of partnership thing! where only selected publishers will get revenue share.
That’s why I said this on X cuz I’m of opinion that it should be more dynamic and accessible revenue sharing program where every site owner can get paid for use of their content by Perplexity.
Need a more accessible system like Google Adsense which any publisher (no matter size) can just paste a code and earn some revenue when Perplexity uses content on the site.
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) August 25, 2025
This will be amazing for the Web 🙂
Rather than it being just select publishers.
And from this interview of Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships!
I got to know its Blavity, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Gannett, The Independent and Time. Even though she said that “publishers could stand to make “millions” from this program” (good for these publishers) but as I mentioned earlier given most of SMB publishers also create content which gets used by Perplexity (of course other bots too) and their main revenue model is people visiting their sites & getting revenue from ad views.
Which now is breaking! because people are getting the answers right away via Perplexity and need to actually go ahead to visit citation source page is minimal.
At the same time Google also seems to be in talks with big publishers to get exclusive access to their content and for sure will be paying them for content which is great I think! Moreover in Jan Google did this specific deal with Associated Press (AP) to provide a real time info feed in Gemini (as of Aug Google hasn’t launched this feature) and OpenAI have already done content/revenue sharing deals with big publishers & those publishers are using OpenAI’s tech to improve their internal products/workflows.
But this broadly leaves a hole in the web! which isn’t getting paid to create!
SMB publishers!
A team of 3 or probably 10
Or just a couple running a recipe blog like Inspired Taste
Or a Windows tech nerd Mayank Parmar who have been writing about Windows on WindosLatest.com for years!
Or Dan an entertainment enthusiast who has been writing reviews of movies/shows on Ready State Cut for years!
I don’t know how this will play out over time but trend is concerning, given users aren’t clicking on links which AI answers are presenting to them (Pew Research)
Less clicks to the webpages -> less visitors -> less ad revenue! for the most of web while some large sites do content deals with tech companies!
I’m not an Activist or something! I’m more of Free Market guy but given where the trend is going there is some need to do activism too to make sure that SMB publishers also get a share of new economic pie that AI companies are creating.
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