Director of Al Jazeera Digital News Jamal Elshayyal speaks to The Take on leading Al Jazeera's next era of journalism. At Web Summit Qatar, we hear from Jamal Elshayyal, Al Jazeera's new Director of Digital News Content, on forging his own path at the network and how those lessons will guide Al Jazeera through the AI age. In this episode: Jamal Elshayyal (@jamalelshayyal), Director, Al Jazeera Digital News Content Global Episode credits:
The pandemic changed Defector's course. New York shut down, the economy ground to a halt, and the offers of capital dried up. So the group decided to launch a new website on their own dime, this time structured as a worker-owned cooperative in which the journalists, rather than media executives, made all the decisions. The site became the kind of success that's rare in digital media nowadays, bringing in $3.2 million in revenue from over 40,000 paying subscribers in its first year alone.
We hit it off immediately and made a point of trying to get together when we coincided in Paris, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. We talked about the news, technology, culture, and politics for hours. Halfway through our conversation during that lunch, he said something I will never forget: "You know, Pablo, one day we might witness the closing of the shop. Somebody will turn off the lights and voilá!"
The centerpiece of this initiative is Plus, a $5-a-month subscription tier designed to deliver smarter browsing as well as channel income back to publishers whose work powers its AI. At the core of Comet Plus lies a $42.5 million , earmarked for early participating publishers and slated to expand as more users join Comet Plus, one that Perplexity promises will expand over time. The model is built on a generous split: publishers 80% of subscription revenue, while Perplexity retains 20% to defray compute and operational costs.
