Meet ScalePost, the AI Firm Helping Perplexity Strike Deals With Publishers

  Rassegna Stampa, Social
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Artificial intelligence startup ScalePost is helping firms like Perplexity—which announced its publisher revenue share program July 30—curry favor with publishers that have typically had a fractious relationship with AI companies.  

ScalePost helps publishers monetize data that might otherwise be scraped by AI bots from firms like Google, OpenAI and Perplexity. The platform helps both AI companies and publishers scale up their number of partners, taking care of functions like onboarding publishers to handling pricing and legal matters. It also provides analytics on how publishers’ content appears in search queries, making it easier for them to track and monetize in the AI search engine era.

Publishers including Time, The Texas Tribune, Fortune, Der Spiegel and Automattic have signed multiyear agreements for Perplexity’s Publisher Program, and Perplexity expects to sign 30 publishers by the end of the year.

Perplexity will share ad revenue with these publishers whenever their content appears alongside ads. The search engine is expected to sell ads later this year. It wouldn’t share specifics of the revenue share deal.

Participating publishers also get a free one-year subscription to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro, which includes access to the company’s developer tools and analytics provided by ScalePost.

“We have the raw data, but ScalePost can make that useful for a better experience, and also make those insights actionable for publishers,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer.

Founded earlier this year by Ahmed Malik and Zach Todd, ScalePost has attracted notable advisors including Rajiv Pant, former chief technology officer at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast and Hearst. Other advisors include Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri; Gideon Lichfield, former global editorial director of Wired; Peter Norvig, former engineering director at Google; and Eric Schurenberg, former CEO of Fast Company and Inc. AI startup TollBit offers similar services.

Co-founder and CEO Malik discussed the company’s growth and the emerging market for AI and publishers, highlighting the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-driven content partnerships.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

 Why did you start ScalePost?

When OpenAI first did a deal with The Associated Press, our ears perked up. We saw three paths where publishers either did nothing with AI, sued AI companies or a third path where they wanted to monetize their content.

We saw Open AI and Google do a few deals, but now Perplexity has come out with this new program, as well, which is very different from licensing deals. So it was that belief and strong thesis that this pattern is here to stay. There are going to be more partnerships between publishers and these new AI companies.

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