Bot creators now have a novel avenue for earning income with Poe, the AI chatbot platform owned by Quora. The company announced on Monday a new revenue model that enables creators to set a price per message for their bots, allowing them to earn money each time a user interacts with them. This initiative follows the introduction of a revenue-sharing scheme in October 2023, designed to grant bot creators a share of the profits when their users sign up for Poe’s premium offering.
Poe, launched by Quora in February 2023, presents users with the opportunity to engage with a diverse range of AI chatbots, including those developed by ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more. The platform aims to provide an accessible environment for experimenting with the latest AI technologies, while also offering Quora a potential avenue for generating new content.
The platform’s revenue models introduce an innovative approach to the creator economy, rewarding individuals who produce “prompt bots” and developers who create server bots that operate within Poe’s AI framework.
Despite announcing plans to introduce a per-message fee for bot interactions last fall and stating it would be implemented “soon,” it took nearly 5 months for this feature to become operational.
Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s CEO, shared on Monday that Poe users will now encounter message points for each bot, corresponding to their existing points as either free users or Poe subscribers. However, creators will receive compensation in dollars. “This pricing mechanism is important for developers with substantial model inference or API costs,” D’Angelo stated in a post on X. He emphasized the aim to foster a vibrant ecosystem of model developers and bot creators by covering operational costs as a crucial component of this initiative.
D’Angelo expressed optimism that the new revenue model would encourage the creation of innovative bot applications in fields such as tutoring, knowledge assistance, analysis, storytelling, and image generation.
Currently exclusive to U.S.-based bot creators, the program is slated for global expansion in the future. It complements the existing monetization program, which offers up to $20 per user who subscribes to Poe as a result of a creator’s bots.
In addition to the per-message payment scheme, Poe has also unveiled an improved analytics dashboard, providing creators with daily updates on average earnings from their bots, across different monetization methods such as paywalls, subscriptions, and messaging. This tool is designed to help creators better understand the impact of their pricing strategies on bot usage and revenue generation.
