Exploring Revenue Models and Concerns of Publishers

The speaker avoided the same fate as Graviards by attracting over 10 million monthly active users before raising a significant amount of money. Currently, the main revenue stream is from users subscribing to the premium version of Perplexity. Future revenue models under consideration include developer APIs for Perplexity models and advertisements. The complexity of incorporating ads into the platform, such as influencing sources or follow-up questions, raises challenges. The speaker acknowledges the uncertainty in bidding on semantic queries for advertisements and the need to develop an equivalent of analytics and AdWords for this new model. Despite concerns from publishers about AI search engines potentially impacting their revenue streams from Google search referrals, the speaker remains optimistic about Perplexity's ability to innovate in the ad business around the new model, potentially offering tailored ad models based on users' queries like travel suggestions. The speaker acknowledges publishers' anxieties about AI-powered search engines like Perplexity potentially reducing referral traffic from Google and impacting their revenue, as users may find answers directly within the platform without clicking on external links.