Perplexity’s $5 bet that AI can pay the press

how Perplexity is betting AI can repair the broken bargain between platforms and the press'

Perplexity launches its Publishers’ Program, offering revenue sharing and recognition for the journalism that powers its AI answers.

The idea is disarmingly simple. Charge readers five dollars, give eighty percent of that money to the people who make the articles, and let an AI browser and answer engine deliver instant explanations linked to the best sources. Perplexity calls the subscription Comet Plus. It seeded a forty two and a half million dollar pool to get the flywheel turning, and says payouts will track a mix of human reading, citations inside answers, and traffic from its AI agents. It is a tiny price, a bold revenue split, and an explicit attempt to repair a relationship that AI has strained since the first summaries began to siphon clicks. The numbers are new, yet the ambition is old. Find a way to reward quality supply while keeping instant answers fast and cheap for users.

You can see why a company in Perplexity’s position would try this. The startup has spent a year at the center of a tense argument about scraping and consent. Some publishers have partnered with it, like Time and Der Spiegel, and others have taken it to court or accused it of ignoring the norms that used to govern bots. A program that measures usage and pays for it is both a business experiment and a peace offering. It is also an implicit admission that the old web bargain where you could crawl first and apologize later is crumbling.

The market context has shifted under everyone’s feet. OpenAI has been signing licensing deals with News Corp, the Financial Times, Axel Springer, and others. That signals a future where at least part of training and real time answering happens on paid terms. If the biggest model makers are writing checks for archives and fresh reporting, a smaller player cannot build a durable product on unpriced inputs. It needs its own contract with supply. Comet Plus is that contract.

There is a second force closing in from the infrastructure layer. Cloudflare has started giving sites a meter, a price, and a policy for AI crawlers. Pay Per Crawl and AI Crawl Control change the default from silent scraping to explicit permission. A crawler without payment intent can now be greeted with a polite 402 Payment Required instead of a shrug. When the pipes begin to enforce price and credentials, marketplaces rise to the surface. Perplexity’s pool is arriving just as the network itself begins to ask the bots who they are and what they plan to pay.

The most interesting part is not the $5. It is the measurement. Perplexity says publishers are paid from three streams. One for human clicks into the article. One for citations that appear in answers. One for the bot’s own interactions in the Comet browser. This is a subtle choice. If you only pay for clicks, you recreate the incentive that AI was supposed to relax. 

If you only pay for raw citations, you open the door to gaming. Perplexity is trying to blend signals that map to trust rather than to clickbait. The company and the press are light on specifics about weights and fraud controls, which is understandable in week one and untenable at scale. The early design does at least aim at the right target. Reward what is used to teach and explain, not just what baits a finger to tap.

If this works, it will be because marketplaces tend to reward the clearest promises. Apple News Plus took half of subscription revenue and poured the rest into a pooled payout based on engagement time. Creators on YouTube get more than half of ad revenue by rule. Comet Plus arrives with a split that is generous by tech standards and a frame that publishers know. There is a pot, a metric, and an allocation. The lesson for any builder is that pricing power often follows from simple contracts that supply understands.

The risks are obvious to anyone who watched creator funds wobble. If the pool grows slower than usage, payouts begin to feel like lottery tickets. If detection and attribution are soft, money will leak to the wrong pages. If a handful of brand name outlets refuse to join, the experience inside the product can feel like a mall with the anchor tenants missing. Each of these is solvable, but only with visible math. Who got paid, for what, and how did the model decide. That level of transparency is rare in ad tech. It will be required here because the alternative is the memory of programs that promised a cut of a pool and then dribbled pennies for a thousand views.

There is also the question of trust at the surface. Comet the browser is not just a reading pane. It is an agent that can browse, summarize, and act. That power is useful, but it widens the blast radius of any security flaw. Recent reporting on indirect prompt injection and unsafe automation in AI browsers is a reminder that paying publishers is only half the contract. The other half is protecting readers as the assistant reads on their behalf. A product that wants to intermediate more of the web must prove it can do so without creating new risks for the people and the sites that feed it.

The hardest hypothesis to test is whether a pool like this can move culture. Apple News Plus did not collapse the web, and it did not save it either. Facebook’s Instant Articles once promised speed and revenue shares and then faded as publishers recalculated the true cost of dependency. Perplexity is different in one way that matters. It sits at the answer layer. When the answer already satisfies the question, the funnel to the source is short. Comet Plus is trying to turn that short path into a fair meter. If the meter pays well enough, more premium sources may allow deeper snippets and faster access. If it does not, the window narrows and the assistant gets dull.

There is an alternate path that publishers and AI firms are testing in parallel. One is licensing the archives and day one stories for model training and in product summaries. That is the OpenAI route. Another is making crawlers pay per request and letting the market discover the marginal value of one fetch. That is the Cloudflare route. Perplexity’s route is usage based revenue sharing at the point of answering. The smart strategic hedge for a newsroom is to blend the three. License the backfile and the daily report where the terms are good. Meter the bot at the gate. Take a share at the surface when a reader asks a question. Each stream reinforces the others. Each stream reduces the incentive to grab content without consent.

If you are building a product that depends on other people’s work, this story is a lesson in sequencing and story honesty. Launch with a principle that supply can defend in a meeting with their CFO. Put real money in the pool on day one. Choose attribution signals that are hard to spoof. Publish a living spec for measurement, fraud controls, and audits, and let outside groups test it. Borrow familiar economic frames from adjacent markets the way Comet Plus borrows a split that looks closer to YouTube than to Apple. Then prepare for the politics. The first big publisher that says no will become a headline. The first lawsuit will get quoted in your signups. The fix is not a press release. It is a habit of showing your math before someone asks.

The punchline is not whether five dollars wins. The punchline is whether an answer engine can make paying for journalism feel normal again. Comet Plus will rise or fall on whether its meter rewards the reporting that makes answers valuable. If it does, the market will nudge other AI products toward similar splits, and the web’s quiet contract will shift from scrape by default to permission with a price. If it does not, publishers will keep raising walls, infrastructure will keep tightening, and the answers will get thinner as the wells run dry. For once, the experiment is easy to judge. Watch who opts in, watch what gets paid, and watch whether the answers you read in September feel richer than the ones you read in July.

If this helped you see how a small price and a generous split might teach the answer layer new manners, share it with a friend who builds products for a living. They will see that marketplaces are not about magic. They are about rules that both sides can live with.