Has Perplexity found the most important innovation in ad delivery ever?
Or perhaps the most insidious form of #bias.
Eric Hal Schwartz in TechRadar describes #perplexity’s plan for sponsorship of “follow-up questions.”
I love perplexity. I have almost never used the follow-up questions. I, of course, am not a typical user of anything.
The average session length is the better part of a half-hour, and there has been speculation that much of this is due to the follow-up questions.
Michael Barrett has written about the dangers of bias of perplexity’s follow-up questions.
From that, I am concerned about how these sponsored questions might interact with perplexity’s “pro” features.
Current sponsors/advertisers look to be media companies. Since they need traffic for its own sake (and their reputation’s sake), I can understand the value there. Since the most common use cases for perplexity is information for writing articles, being seen here can result in a reference in the created piece (can you say “backlinks”) and ultimately much higher visibility.
I am curious as to how these sponsored questions play out.
Despite it being an interesting question, I fear that I might not notice when they start.
(Have they started yet?)
