Pivoting in business is difficult and often done only when alternatives are worse. Perplexity relaunched a revenue-sharing program offering Comet Plus, a $5 monthly subscription that grants access to content from participating publisher partners while passing most revenue to them, backed by an initial $42.5 million commitment from CEO Aravind Srinivas. The program is named after the Comet browser but content is accessible from any browser; using Comet enables the Comet Assistant. Comet Plus is included in Pro and Max subscriptions. Perplexity maintains its ad-based Perplexity Publishers' Program, which shares ad revenue when partner content appears in answers. News Corp sued Perplexity over alleged copyright violations while praising OpenAI for signing up-front content.
Quick recap: Perplexity announced a new kind of subscription called Comet Plus. Users can pay $5 a month to access content from Perplexity's publisher partners-that is, those who sign up to participate-and Perplexity passes on most of the revenue to them. It's already set aside $42.5 million to kick-start the program, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. Although the program is named after the company's new Comet web browser, users can use any browser to access the content via Perplexity.
Launched last summer, the PPP is an ad-based program; when a partner's content is featured in an answer, revenue created from ads in that answer (typically a sponsored question) is shared with that partner. Perplexity isn't sunsetting the PPP- Gannett just signed up for it. Still, it's hard to see Comet Plus as at least a partial admission that the PPP wasn't a great answer to building a business around AI search,
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