Particle.news
Download on the App Store
5 ARTICLES
·
1h ago

Perplexity Unveils $42.5 Million Publisher Payouts Tied to Comet Plus

The subscription-funded plan seeks to address newsroom concerns over AI summaries diverting traffic.

Image
Perplexity, led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, is building Comet—an AI search engine to compete with Google.
Image

Overview

  • Comet Plus is priced at $5 per month, with 80% of subscription revenue earmarked for participating publishers.
  • Payouts are triggered when content gets traffic via the Comet browser, appears in Comet search results, or is used by Comet’s AI assistant to complete tasks.
  • Perplexity announced the initiative after a federal judge refused last week to dismiss a copyright suit brought by Dow Jones and the New York Post.
  • Cloudflare has alleged Perplexity bypassed site blocks to pull data, which the company disputes by saying its assistant accesses pages only at a user’s direction.
  • The company cites earlier ad revenue pilots with Time, the Los Angeles Times and Fortune, alongside recent fundraising and a reported $34.5 billion offer for Google’s Chrome.