• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Perplexity AI’s Comet browser will become a source of income for publishers through a new subscription service launched Monday

The service, Comet Plus, gives Perplexity users access to premium content from a group of publishers and journalists. The company aside a $42.5 million fund to distribute to participating publishers. It will be distributed among publishers whose content is used and found through its AI-powered search results.

The entire industry supported by online content has begun to experience the next phase of the internet. The hope is low-quality clickbait, high-friction experiences, and endless blue links will become a thing of the past. These practices exhaust internet users as innovation moves technology to the next phase of search, discovery, and advertising.

Perplexity's goal is to compensate publishers that have become frustrated with losing revenue by adapting to a version of the web where readers have lost trust and brands try to protect their reputations from eroding.

“AI has already given internet users the power to get more from the web,” which is why the Comet browser offers something new, Perplexity explained in a blog post.

Publishers in this new model earn money when content that appears in Perplexity's search queries or is used to fulfill tasks in the Comet browser. They will receive a share of revenue generated from ads shown in the search engine. 

Comet Plus's compensation model allocates revenue to partners based on internet traffic from human visits, search citations, and agent actions. It's based on how consumers browse manually, ask for AI-generated answers, or deploy agents for complex tasks. 

The revenue-sharing program is in response to legal and ethical criticisms from media companies regarding the use of their copyrighted articles serving up in search engines and generative AI engines. It builds on earlier reports by the company about revenue sharing strategies that began last year.

Think of Apple News+ program. In Perplexity’s version, customers pay $5 a month to access a curated selection of content from publishers. This AI version introduces a new method of sharing revenue based on how often content appears.