Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas proposes revenue deals for publishers after lawsuit

Perplexity wants to reach revenue-sharing partnerships with news publishers that have criticized the AI-search startup for allegedly misappropriating their content, its chief executive said Wednesday.

Aravind Srinivas, who also founded Perplexity, made the comments at WSJ Tech Live two days after Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and sister publication the New York Post sued his startup for copyright infringement. Other news publishers, including the New York Times, have sent Perplexity legal notices requesting that the search engine stop using their content.

Perplexity uses generative AI to power a search engine that it wants to compete with Alphabet’s Google.

Srinivas threw cold water on the idea of signing licensing agreements with publishers that would pay them directly for the websites’ content that Perplexity feeds into its algorithms to help its chatbot generate answers for users.

Instead, he articulated a vision where Perplexity would share advertising revenue with publishers, a pool of money he said would grow over time. He compared it to the revenue splits that music-streaming service Spotify offers artists. Perplexity at the end of July announced partnerships along those lines with a handful of publishers, including Time and Fortune.

As part of that effort, Srinivas said Perplexity is launching its advertising program later this month.

Also as part of possible commercial deals, he proposed supplying publishers with Perplexity-powered chatbots that would provide answers to user queries on the publishers’ sites, based on their own content.

In its lawsuit, Dow Jones touted the value of licensing agreements that it and other publishers have signed with other technology companies. News Corp, owner of Dow Jones and the Post, earlier this year struck a content-licensing partnership with Perplexity rival OpenAI that could be worth more than $250 million over five years for the news conglomerate.

Srinivas said representatives of Dow Jones had reached out to Perplexity “around” June and that it responded, saying it was open to talking and “interested in a proper commercial discussion.”

“We certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit because we actually wanted a conversation,” he said.

The Dow Jones and Post lawsuit said Perplexity hadn’t responded to a July letter from News Corp publishers addressing “unauthorized use” of the publisher’s copyrighted works and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal.

Dow Jones declined to comment on Wednesday.

Srinivas said Perplexity is experiencing fast growth. It fielded 350 million user queries in September alone, up from 500 million for all of 2023. He hopes that by 2026 the service could answer half a billion queries a day.

“I don’t think just licensing content is the only solution. Neither am I saying our publisher program is already there,” he said. “I hope that more conversations will get us there.”