As the internet changes, publishers are having a harder time being paid for their hard work, but Perplixity has envisioned a way for them to be compensated with a new subscription plan called Comet Plus. The plan aims to help publishers earn revenue in this new age of the internet. There was a time when if you wanted information, you’d simply go to a search engine like Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or any number of others, and you’d type in your query. You’d get a list of results and then click on the link that seemed the most appropriate based on what you were looking for.
These days, that’s still technically the way things work. However, the age of AI has made it possible to more or less cannibalize those clicks, leading to less revenue for publishers. This has, in large part, been exacerbated by creations like AI Overviews in Google. A collection of gathered information that gets pulled from websites and fed to the user right on the search results page. In many cases, users no longer have to click on an article to get the information they need. The Comet Plus plan is designed as a way to make sure publishers are fairly compensated as users continue to use AI to get the information they’re seeking.
Perplexity says a better internet requires a better model, and it believes Comet Plus is that model
It’s hard out there for publishers these days. Losing clicks to AI when a user asks an AI agent to summarize information on a specific topic can lead to a better user experience, but it leaves publishers out in the cold. Comet Plus will hopefully fix this to some degree. At least, that’s what Perplexity is hoping.
“AI is an intrinsic part of how we browse the internet. When you read the news on a website with your morning coffee, that’s human traffic. When you ask Perplexity to synthesize recent coverage of an industry trend, that’s indexed traffic. And when Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles relevant to your day’s meetings, that’s agent traffic. Each represents real value creation, yet traditional models only compensate for the first,” Perplexity says.
The issue, as recognized by Perplexity, is that publishers are trapped in the now-ancient economics of clicks and pageviews. In this AI internet age, the need for quality information matters more than it ever has. AI makes it incredibly easy to feed misinformation to anyone seeking it out. All the while, publishers working hard to provide this quality information are finding it harder and harder to deliver it. Because doing the work costs money. That money is scarcer now, thanks to the way AI feeds information to the user. This is where Comet Plus comes in.
Comet Plus will allocate revenue based on three factors
Here’s essentially how it works. A user will subscribe to Perplexity’s Comet Plus for $5 a month. From there, when users search for something using Perplexity, they’ll be able to gain access to a collection of trusted publishers. Comet Plus will look at when humans visit a site based on a search, but it will also factor in search citations and agent actions.
With this model in place, users can decide how they want to consume what they’re looking for. Publishers, on the other end of things, get compensation. Even if the AI agent is the tool being used to feed information. In other words, publishers get paid whether there’s a human visit or not. The publishing partners for Comet Plus haven’t been announced yet. However, Perplexity says it’ll announce the initial partners once Comet goes free for all. The company doesn’t give a timeline on when that is.
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