Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program with LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and more than a dozen other news organizations signing up. Unless publishers withdraw, they will receive a share in the revenue generated by advertising on Perplexity and metrics to track the performance of their content.
“If news outlets didn't continue to report on a wide range of topics, we wouldn't be able to provide meaningful, fact-based answers,” Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “We are excited to welcome these new publishers to the program.”
More than a dozen publishers are participating, including Spanish-language media brand Pris Media, newspaper conglomerate Lee Enterprises, and The Independent. Other new members include Blavity, NewsPicks, Minkabu Infonoid, Gear Patrol, MediaLab, DPReview, World History Encyclopedia, and RTL German brands NTV and Stern.
It's unclear how well these publishers informed their staff about the partnership before announcing it publicly. LA Times officials told TechCrunch that reporters were either not informed of the deal with Perplexity or only heard mention of it in passing, and that the editorial board was not given an opportunity to comment on the deal with leadership. Ta.
Adweek officials said some staff members were not informed or given a say. A reporter learned about the deal through a press release.
“[Everyone’s] I was confused. That's really the best word,” an LA Times source said. “I don't think anyone has enough information to say whether this is positive or negative. Some people have never heard of Perplexity, so… [there’s] The truth is, there just isn't enough information to form any opinions on it. But knowing more will surely make everyone think. ”
Notable among the new groups is the New York Times, which sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in October asking it to stop accessing its articles without permission. Dow Jones and the New York Post, which own the Wall Street Journal and other news services, are also not participating in Perplexity's program. They are suing the company over what they call “content theft politics.”
Perplexity has a complicated relationship with publishers. The company's search engine uses AI to synthesize and summarize news and other content from around the web. However, the way Perplexity presents these summaries and the company's data collection tactics remains a point of contention.
Perplexity uses AI to pull information from a variety of sources. Image credit: Perplexity
This summer, Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing paywalled content and subsequently threatened the company with legal action. Around the same time, Wired published an article that found Perplexity's platform was paraphrasing its own stories, sometimes inaccurately.
By late October, Perplexity was summarizing at least some paywalled news, according to Copyleaks, a company that develops technology to detect AI-generated text.
Perplexity said in a blog post in response to the Dow Jones lawsuit that the publisher wants its technology to “never exist” and that it wants “the published facts to be owned by the company.” He claimed that there was. But the post declined to say whether Perplexity is regurgitating content at scale and competing with publishers of that content for the same audience, as some have claimed.
Perplexity claims to cite sources, and it does. However, sometimes the citation is incorrect.
In a move unlikely to foster friendly relationships with publishers, Perplexity is keeping the details of the program's terms secret. This summer, the company told The Verge that the deal is “multi-year” with “double-digit” percentages, and payments will be made for each article Perplexity provides to its users. But when TechCrunch asked about the terms this week, a spokesperson said Perplexity “does not share financial details.”
Perplexity may be cautious about making its terms public. Publishers may use it as leverage in negotiations with competitors. In October, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search, a rival AI-powered search tool, with its publishing partners including The Atlantic, News Corp., and Vox Media.
Unlike Perplexity's Publisher Program, OpenAI gives publishers control over how their content appears in search results. Perplexity previously said it was working on content management, but did not provide an update on its progress this morning.
As Perplexity's program expands, the startup could face greater pressure to recoup costs from investors. Perplexity is said to have raised $500 million in a deal valued at $9 billion. But as of October, its annual recurring revenue was only about $50 million, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas sounds optimistic. He said in a post on X on Wednesday that Perplexity now handles about 20 million queries per day, up from 2.5 million per day at the beginning of the year.