Search engine startup Neeva will pay Quora, Medium for results

Band Paresh Dave

June 3 (Reuters) – Web search startup Neeva said on Thursday it would share at least 20% of its sales with content partners such as Quora and Medium in another break with search giant Google, which for years has been criticized for do not pay publishers.

The revenue-sharing plan reflects a growing trend among tech companies as they face regulatory scrutiny of their outsized market power over content producers.

Neeva said in a blog post that it will pay partners when “their content is used to respond directly to a Neeva customer’s query.” He added to Reuters that the fee would be based on “a combination of unique impression and value”.

The company was co-founded in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s former senior vice president for ads, after becoming disappointed with ad-laden search results pages. Neeva, unlike Google, is ad-free by charging users $5 per month. The results come mainly from Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O Bing, although users can also search for some personal files.

When subscriber questions are best answered with information on the Quora Q&A forum or the Medium blog network, Neeva will post a detailed snippet and compensate the partner.

Quora and Medium told Reuters they would pass on some revenue to their contributors.

Neeva told Reuters that the requirements for becoming a partner would be defined as the program develops. Partner relationships will not affect the order of results, Neeva added.

Newspapers and benchmarking tools have criticized Google for pulling similar snippets without payment. For years, Google said websites benefited because previews brought in visitors, who could see ads or be resold.

Yet Google last year announced $1 billion in funding for news publications as part of a first-of-its-kind content licensing program for the company.

Neeva in a blog post criticized older services for a long failure to support content companies.

“When creators aren’t rewarded for creating great content, they aren’t motivated to create it, and we all suffer for that,” he said.

(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by David Gregorio)

((paresh.dave@thomsonreuters.com; 415-565-1302;))

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