Quora Poe launches AI chatbot creator economy

When you hear “creator,” you probably think of someone who makes content for TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram. Quora’s AI chatbot platform Poe now pays bot creators, including those who create “prompt bots” on Poe and server bots created by developers who integrate their bots with Poe AI.

The program, launched last week, is one of the first to financially reward AI bot builders.

Bot creators have two income streams at launch. First, Poe will immediately pay the bot’s creator a portion of the revenue if the bot refers a user. Bot creators can set a per-message fee that Quora will pay for every message. The latter option will open soon, according to the company.

First released in February, Quora’s Poe chatbot app lets users ask questions and get answers from AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google-backed Anthropic. Poe’s content would help Quora evolve and allow consumers to experiment with new AI technologies in one place, the company said. Poe’s content will be distributed on Quora to its 400 million monthly visitors if it meets quality standards.

Poe has been gaining popularity in the AI chatbot market.

Market intelligence provider Apptopia reported 253,530 downloads of Poe’s mobile app in its first month. Over 18.4 million installs as of October 24th. Additionally, the app has nearly 1.22 million monthly active users. Poe currently generates less than $250,000 in in-app purchase revenue per month, according to Apptopia. This is not a complete look at Poe’s numbers because many users may be using the chatbot platform on the web and signing up for its $19.99/month or $199.99/year subscription.

Only U.S. users can participate in Poe’s creator monetization program, which pays up to $20 per bot-generated subscriber. This metric is calculated if the creator brings a user to Poe for the first time and they subscribe; if a bot brings a user back to Poe who subscribes; if a bot’s paywall is seen just before the user subscribes; or soon, if users send messages to your bot at a developer-set price. Some expensive bots will be subscriber-only and limited in message sending, Quora says.

When someone subscribes to Poe, the company sets aside $10 per month or $20 per year. According to the company’s developer docs, “any monetizing creators with successfully converting activations and successfully converting paywalls for that subscription” receive that amount. Payouts are processed by Stripe.

Quora believes this program will allow a new class of smaller companies or AI research groups to create public bots without the resources to build an AI chatbot application. Through an affiliate program, Poe can pay to onboard new chatbot app subscribers. That may help ChatGPT compete with other AI chatbot apps, many of which make more money on mobile devices than it.

In an announcement, Quroa CEO Adam D’Angelo said, “We expect all kinds of bots to do well, across areas like tutoring, knowledge, therapy, entertainment, assistants, analysis, storytelling, roleplay, and image, video, music, and other media “Since this is the start of a new market, there are many opportunities to help the world and make money,” he said.