[Kylie Robison at The Verge]

"Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue."

Now we're talking. This was inevitable.

It also opens the floodgates: there's a world where any publisher gets a direct revenue share for being a source, if they sign up and license their content. This seems like a solid improvement.

Which brings me to Automattic's involvement. As Matt Mullenweg says in the piece:

"It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero."

Automattic will actually be sharing the revenue with customers of its hosted WordPress product. I'm not sure if that includes WordPress VIP, its premium product for publishers. Whether free hosted WordPress publishers who are used as sources by Perpexity see any kind of revenue share is also a mystery, which might put some foreign publishers in a bad place in particular.

Still, in general, although there will certainly be kinks to work out, this sets a really good precedent. More, please.

#AI

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