Perplexity has abandoned its advertising endeavour a little more than a year after launch, according to reports.
The ChatGPT rival is now set to wind down its advertising program by the end of this year, according to the Financial Times.
Perplexity was one of the first LLMs to dip its toe into advertising and had ambitions to build a revenue-sharing model with publisher partners.
When it launched the offering, its executives claimed that ads were clearly labelled and didn’t influence outputs.
However, the firms execs have now said that the perception that outputs might change based on ad spending is as important as policy.
One anonymous exec quoted in the report said advertising risks making users “suspicious of everything”.
“A user needs to believe this is the best possible answer, to keep using the product and be willing to pay for it,” an unnamed Perplexity executive told the FT.
“[The] challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything… which is why we don’t see it as a fruitful thing to focus on right now.”
“We are in the accuracy business, and the business is giving the truth, the right answers,” another executive added, arguing that ads are “misaligned with what the users want.”
Perplexity had said advertising was essential to its business and that enterprise subscriptions alone were not enough to build a sustainable business.
However, fewer than 0.5 per cent of brands who applied to advertise on the platform were ever admitted, and Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, departed the company in September last year.
