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Publisher frustration is mounting at AI search startup Perplexity, which is backed by Jeff Bezos and other tech titans, for circumventing attempts to block its crawlers from accessing and serving up media content, potentially cutting publishers out of billions in ad revenue.
The New York Times, The Guardian, Condé Nast and Forbes are among those who have blocked PerplexityBot and Perplexity AI over the last five months from crawling their content and subsequently regurgitating it and, in the case of the claims by Forbes, earning ad revenue from it. (Perplexity doesn’t appear to serve ads, but plans to in the second half of this year).
Perplexity—valued at $1 billion per Bloomberg—is the latest AI thorn in publishers’ side. News sites started blocking OpenAI crawlers in 2023 following the tech’s surging popularity. Some are locked in legal battles for copyright theft, while others are striking deals.
But while some AI models like OpenAI and Google Overview acknowledge publishers blocking their crawlers, Perplexity doesn’t appear to. The search startup has a $20 monthly subscription offer and plans to strike revenue-sharing deals with publishers, it previously told ADWEEK.
The Guardian, which blocked Perplexity in March, wrote to the startup to request that it secure a commercial license for the use of its intellectual property, a company spokesperson told ADWEEK. Perplexity has yet to respond.
“The Guardian is not alone in seeing growing instances of theft of high-quality journalism by venture capital-backed software developers who believe that they can do so in plain sight,” the spokesperson said.
Forbes, which blocked Perplexity earlier this month after noticing copyright infringements, has demanded Perplexity remove infringing articles and reimburse the publisher for the ad revenue earned by the startup from displaying copies of its content. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas defended the company’s practices on X, telling a Forbes journalist that the incident was due to a new feature with “rough edges” being refined with feedback.
Billions in lost ad revenue
Perplexity’s method of surfacing summaries and video content poses a significant threat to publishers’ display and video revenue, particularly from pre-roll videos on news sites, according to Ameet Shah, partner and svp of publisher operations and strategy at Prohaska Consulting.
