Get Featured & Publish Press Release
On MSN

What Is MSN?

MSN is Microsoft's news and lifestyle portal, and it works as a licensed collection point for other people's journalism rather than as a publication with its own reporters. Almost everything a visitor reads at msn.com was written and first published somewhere else, then delivered to Microsoft under a content agreement and re-rendered inside the MSN template with the original publisher's name attached.

A portal that outgrew the dial-up service it was named after

MSN began as Microsoft's own dial-up online service and kept the name through every change in what it actually was: a proprietary network, then a web portal, now a personalized feed. The verticals that survived are the ones people still associate with the name, MSN Money, MSN Weather, MSN Autos, alongside news, sports, health, travel and entertainment. Every one of them is filled by licensed publishing partners rather than by staff, and Microsoft runs localized editions of the same portal in many countries and languages.

An aggregation surface rather than a newsroom

There is no MSN business desk that assigns a story to a staff writer, no MSN technology editor building a beat, no reporter who will call you back. What exists is a licensing operation and a ranking system. Content enters the pool because a publisher is contracted into it, and content gets seen because the recommendation layer decides a given reader is likely to open that card. The MSN article page even labels this openly: the source line credits the partner publication, and the story usually links back to where it first ran.

The audience and how it arrives

MSN's readership is largely inherited from Microsoft's own software rather than recruited by MSN itself. The main doors are the Edge browser's Start page, the widgets board that opens from the Windows taskbar, the MSN mobile app, and search. That entry path means the typical reader did not go looking for news about your sector; they opened a browser or checked a weather panel and a headline card was already sitting there. The audience is broad and general-interest, and nothing in the route that brought them filters for professional relevance.

What the authority and traffic figures describe

MSN carries a Domain Authority of 97 and receives 20M+ monthly visits, which puts the domain among the largest news properties on the open web. Those numbers describe the whole portal, weather panels and sports scores included, not any single article on it. A page here inherits the crawl frequency and reputational weight of the domain, and it competes for attention against everything else the network pushes into feeds on the same day.

How Content Actually Reaches MSN

Content reaches MSN through publisher licensing, not through a submission desk, which is the single most important thing to understand before buying a placement here. Microsoft signs agreements with publications; those publications feed their articles into the Microsoft Start network; the system ingests, categorizes and ranks them. Nothing enters that pipeline from outside it.

Microsoft Start is the machinery behind the brand

The content platform Microsoft operates under the Start name is what supplies MSN. The same ingestion and recommendation layer feeds the msn.com portal, the Edge new tab experience, the Windows widgets panel and Microsoft's news apps. When people talk about being on MSN, they are describing an article that entered that shared network and became visible on the msn.com surface of it. That is why the same article can appear on a phone widget and a desktop homepage at once.

The partner publication owns the byline

Because access runs through licensed publishers, an MSN press release is placed at the publisher end. The release is prepared and published by a publication that is licensed into the Microsoft Start network, and the syndicated copy then appears on msn.com under that publication's name and logo, usually with attribution pointing back to the original page. You are not buying a byline that reads MSN; you are buying entry into the network that MSN renders.

What the recommendation engine decides

Ingestion and prominence are two different things. Being in the network means the article exists on msn.com with a real URL that can be crawled, indexed, shared and cited. Feed placement, meaning whether a general reader in a particular country sees the headline card in their personalized stream, is decided by a ranking system weighing topic, freshness, region, publisher signals and engagement. No distributor anywhere controls that ranking, and anyone who says they do is selling something they cannot deliver.

How an MSN Placement Differs From a Placement in a Reporting Newsroom

The difference is reach versus scrutiny: a title with staff reporters gives you fewer readers but an editorial judgment attached, while MSN gives you a very large surface with no judgment attached at all. Both have value, and they are not interchangeable.

No reporter is evaluating your company

When a trade publication writes about a funding round, a person read the deck, asked questions and decided the story was worth the column inches. That decision is the product. On MSN, no equivalent decision happens about your company. The publishing partner applies its standards for submitted content, the network ingests the piece, and the recommendation layer treats it as one more candidate. Publication means the announcement cleared a submitted-content bar, and nothing beyond that should ever be implied.

What you gain instead

What you gain is scale and recognition. The story sits in a template a customer reads as mainstream media even when they have never heard of your industry's trade press, on a domain Microsoft's own search and assistant products draw from. For a founder assembling credibility in front of buyers, recruits or investors, that is a real asset, and it is exactly why people go looking for this option.

Say it accurately in your own marketing

Describe the outcome in language you can defend. Saying your launch was covered on MSN invites the assumption that a Microsoft journalist chose you. Saying your announcement was published on MSN is accurate, still lands with the audience you want, and will not embarrass you when a diligence process asks who wrote the piece.

Which Announcements Fit a Mainstream Aggregation Audience

The announcements that work here are the ones a non-specialist reader can understand from the headline alone, because MSN's audience is general public rather than industry insiders. If your news needs three paragraphs of category education before it makes sense, it will be published and it will be ignored.

News that translates without a glossary

Consumer product launches, price or availability changes, funding rounds with a stated amount, market entry into a named country, hiring milestones, acquisitions, partnerships with a recognizable counterparty, survey findings about everyday behavior, and safety or recall notices all read cleanly to a general audience. So do results-style announcements when the numbers are concrete. A reader scrolling a feed decides in a fraction of a second whether the headline concerns them, and specificity is what wins that decision.

The categories that appear most naturally on this surface

• Consumer technology, apps and devices, where the audience overlaps directly with Windows and Edge users
• Money, personal finance and business expansion news, which map onto long-standing MSN verticals
• Health, wellness and lifestyle announcements presented with sourcing rather than health claims
• Travel, autos and entertainment, all of which are established sections on the portal
• Corporate milestones with a number in them, such as funding, revenue, headcount, plant openings or store counts

What lands flat here

Internal reorganizations with no customer consequence, vague partnerships without terms, thought-leadership essays dressed as news, and anniversary posts are weak candidates. They can be published, but they waste the surface. An announcement with a verifiable number in its first line produces a page people actually open and that other writers can quote later.

Sensitive and regulated subjects

Financial products, crypto assets, supplements, medical devices, gambling, adult categories and anything making a therapeutic claim face tighter standards from publishers and from the network that ingests their content. That does not make them impossible, but it does make wording decisive. Claims must be attributed, forward-looking statements must be framed as expectations rather than facts, and regulatory status should be stated plainly instead of implied.

How to Publish a Press Release on MSN in Three Steps

Three steps: confirm the placement and its current terms with RedPress, supply a finished release or the raw facts, and approve the draft before it is scheduled with the partner publication. Because MSN itself takes nothing directly, every one of those steps happens with the licensed publisher, and the msn.com copy follows on its own schedule afterward.

Step one: confirm scope before you pay

Check the metrics panel on this page for the current fee and turnaround, then ask support the questions that are specific to an aggregated surface: which regional editions of MSN the partner's licence actually reaches, the current link policy on both the original and the syndicated copy, whether your category is accepted, and whether you can supply your own image. That last one matters more here than on an ordinary site, because a feed card is a headline, a source name and a picture, and the picture has to be one you demonstrably own.

Step two: submit the release or the raw material

If you have a finished release, supply the headline, dateline city, body, boilerplate and a named contact with a monitored address. If you do not, supply the facts: what happened, the figures, who is quoted and their exact title, the company's legal name, the location, and any source you want cited. Everything is edited for house style regardless, and a headline that works on your own site often has to be rebuilt so it still makes sense as a card sitting next to a weather widget.

Step three: approve, publish, receive the URL

You see the version that will run, and once you approve it the placement is scheduled. What comes back is the live address of the published article on the partner publication, not a distribution report describing where a file was sent. That page is what enters the Microsoft Start ingestion path, so the msn.com copy appears after it rather than at the same moment. Save both addresses once the second one exists; they do different jobs for the rest of the campaign.

Writing for a Reader Who Arrived From a Feed

Write for someone who did not choose your story and is one thumb-flick from leaving, because that is exactly how MSN readers arrive. The card in the feed shows a headline, an image and a source name, and everything else you spent time on is invisible until that card earns a tap.

The headline is the entire pitch

Name the company in the headline, because the card will not do it for you: the source line under an MSN card shows the partner publication's name, never yours. State the concrete development and the party involved, skip the wordplay, include the figure if there is one, and keep it short enough that it does not truncate on a phone card. A general reader will not decode an industry acronym, so spell it out or leave it out.

The first sentence must survive on its own

Many readers see only the headline and a preview line pulled from the top of the article. Load the specifics into that first sentence: who did what, where, at what scale, and when. Company history, addressable market and mission statement belong far enough down that an interested reader still finds them and an uninterested one never has to step over them.

Numbers, quotes and attribution

Every claim of leadership, growth or ranking should carry a source that a skeptical reader could check independently. Quotes should say something a real person would say about the specific development, ideally adding information rather than enthusiasm. A quote that explains why a decision was made is useful; a quote asserting that the company is thrilled and excited occupies space without paying rent. Titles in quote attributions should be exact.

Structure that survives being re-rendered

Your article will be reformatted when it is ingested into the Microsoft Start network, so the presentation you control on your own site is not the presentation the MSN reader sees. Use plain paragraphs and simple subheadings. Avoid layouts that depend on styling, tables of comparison marks, embedded widgets or design flourishes. Keep paragraphs short, because a wall of text on a phone screen is closed rather than read.

Where Your Story Travels After Publication

A single placement produces several addressable surfaces: the publisher's own article page, the msn.com copy, the personalized Start feeds inside Microsoft products, and whatever search and assistant results those pages later feed. They behave differently and are worth understanding separately.

The publisher page and the MSN copy

The publisher page is the stable asset. It stays where it is, keeps its address, and is the version you cite in a deck or an about-us page. The msn.com copy is the reach asset. It carries the same text under the same publication name inside Microsoft's template, and its job is to put the story in front of an audience that would never visit the publisher directly. Keep both links.

Regional editions and language surfaces

MSN runs localized editions across many markets, each with its own front page and its own mix. Which editions a given article surfaces in depends on the publisher's licensed regions and on the topic, so a story about a United States product launch will not automatically appear on a Japanese edition. If a specific market matters to your campaign, ask support what a placement covers before ordering rather than assuming global distribution.

Bing, Copilot and assistant answers

Bing is the retrieval layer behind Microsoft's assistant products, and msn.com is a Microsoft property, so a page here sits close to the index that grounds those answers rather than several hops away from it. That is a structural position, not a promise: whether an assistant cites you depends on the question asked and on what else exists about your company. Nobody selling a placement can make Copilot mention you, and no reputable one will say otherwise.

What Stops a Placement From Going Through

Placements stall on the copy far more often than on the company behind it, and the fixes are almost always available before submission. A publisher licensed into Microsoft Start has a distribution deal to lose, so it tends to apply a tighter standard to submitted content than a standalone site with nothing at stake would. The piece is also judged twice over: once by the publisher's editor, and again by an ingestion system that decides whether it belongs in a general-audience feed.

Promotional voice

Superlatives without support are the usual sticking point. Words like revolutionary, world-class and unparalleled signal marketing copy rather than an announcement. Second-person sales language, calls to action and discount codes belong on a landing page. The release should report a development; the reader decides what it means for them.

Unverifiable claims and missing entity detail

• Rankings, market position and growth figures asserted without a named source or methodology
• Health, financial or safety outcomes stated as facts rather than as findings attributed to a study
• Company details that do not resolve anywhere: no working site, no legal entity name, no location
• Quotes attributed to a person whose role cannot be confirmed from any public source
• Comparisons that name a competitor in a way a reasonable lawyer would flag

Category and compliance blocks

Some subjects are declined regardless of how carefully they are written, and the list varies by publisher and by market. Anything promising financial returns, anything in the adult or gambling categories, and anything that a regulator would treat as an unlicensed offer are the usual cases. If your announcement sits close to one of those lines, ask support first. Getting a category confirmed in advance costs a message and saves a rejected order.

Practical formatting failures

Releases arrive with a dateline missing the city, tracking parameters glued onto every link, or a contact line pointing at an unmonitored inbox. Image rights are the one worth flagging separately: a stock picture grabbed from a search results page is a problem on any site, but here it is also the picture that will sit on a card inside Microsoft's own products, which is not a place a publisher wants a licensing complaint to originate. Supply artwork you can prove you own.

What Does an MSN Placement Cost?

The fee for this placement is shown in the metrics panel on this page alongside the expected turnaround, with no quote request in between. What is worth explaining here is what that fee buys on an aggregated surface, where the thing you are paying for is not quite the thing whose name is on the page.

What the fee covers

It covers the editorial pass on your copy, publication by the licensed partner, and the return of the live URL. It does not cover the msn.com copy as a separately purchasable item, because that copy is produced by ingestion rather than by anyone taking an order for it. It is a one-off transaction tied to one announcement, not a recurring seat, and the article does not come down because you stopped buying. Restructuring needed to meet the standards above happens before publication rather than arriving as an extra line.

Why an MSN-class listing prices where it does

Two things move a figure like this one. The first is the size of what the publisher is risking: a partner feeding a Microsoft-licensed network loses far more from a bad submitted article than a regional blog does, and that risk is priced into how much scrutiny each piece gets. The second is name recognition, which is a real cost driver rather than a markup, because demand concentrates on the handful of outlets a non-specialist has actually heard of. A narrow regional site with a small readership prices differently for exactly the inverse reasons.

What Results Should You Expect?

Expect a durable, citable page on a very large domain, plus a syndicated copy on msn.com, and treat everything beyond that as upside rather than as the plan. Anyone describing guaranteed traffic volumes or guaranteed feed prominence from a syndicated announcement is guessing on your behalf.

What is committed and what is not

Committed: publication of your announcement, and the live link back to you. Not committed: how the recommendation system ranks the card, how many readers open it, which regional editions display it, whether a Microsoft assistant later cites it, and whether other outlets pick it up. Those outcomes depend on your subject matter and on systems no distributor operates, which is why they are described here as possibilities rather than as deliverables.

Realistic traffic expectations

Reader interest tracks the news, not the domain. A consumer announcement with a recognizable product and a clear benefit can attract meaningful attention on a surface this size. A niche business-to-business notice on the same surface will draw a small number of clicks and still be worth doing for the reference value. Decide before you order which of those two outcomes you are buying, and measure against that rather than against a hope.

The honest answer about links

Whether the link to your site is followed or unfollowed is set by the editorial policy of the publisher, not by RedPress and not by any distributor. Policies change, and they can differ between the original article and a syndicated copy. The RedPress live support team confirms the current position for this placement before you order, which is the only reliable way to know. Treat any vendor that promises a followed link as unreliable on everything else too.

How to measure it

Set up measurement in advance: a branded search alert, a note of your baseline branded search volume, a record of your referring domains, and a screenshot of both URLs on the day each appears. Screenshots matter more here than elsewhere, because the msn.com copy is a rendering of someone else's article and you do not control how long it looks the way it looks today. Then check Bing as well as Google, since that is the index this particular placement is closest to, and judge the whole thing on a horizon of months rather than on the morning-after analytics of a page whose value is cumulative.

Who Should Publish on MSN?

This placement suits organizations whose buyers are ordinary consumers or non-specialist decision makers, and whose credibility improves when a household-name domain carries their announcement. It suits them better than it suits companies chasing a narrowly technical audience.

Consumer brands and product companies

If your customer is a person rather than a procurement committee, the entry path works in your favour. The reader who meets your headline on an Edge Start page or a Windows widgets board is the same reader who will never open your industry's trade press but has seen the MSN name attached to their weather panel and their browser start page for years. Launches, availability, pricing changes, retail partnerships and seasonal campaigns all sit naturally beside the consumer sections the portal has always run.

Funded startups and companies in a diligence process

Founders raising capital, hiring senior staff or entering procurement conversations get asked what independent coverage exists. A page on a top-tier domain answers that question in one link, provided you describe it accurately as a published announcement. It also gives search engines something to associate with your company name at exactly the moment when people start searching it.

Agencies and communications teams

For an agency, this is a way to get featured on MSN for a client on a defined budget with a known deliverable, without spending weeks on outreach that may produce nothing. It is not a substitute for earned media relationships and should never be presented internally as one. It is a reliable floor underneath a campaign whose ceiling is still the reporting you pitch.

Who should look elsewhere first

If your entire market is a few thousand engineers, a specialist publication with a small but exact readership will do more for the same budget, because reach you cannot use is not reach. If your announcement has no news value, no placement manufactures it. And a general-interest feed is the wrong instrument for anything that needs a knowledgeable reader to appreciate it, since the ranking system is optimizing for a mainstream reader's attention, not your prospect's.

Why an MSN Placement Builds Lasting Search Authority

The lasting value is entity association: a permanent, crawlable page on one of the largest news domains on the web that states your company name, what it does, where it is and what it just did. Search systems weigh corroboration from independent domains when deciding what a company is, and this is a strong corroborating document.

Recognition beats raw link math

Whether or not a link is followed, the page still exists, still contains your brand name, and still ties that name to specific facts. That association is read by crawlers, by knowledge systems and increasingly by language models retrieving context about companies. A brand mentioned on high-authority news domains is easier for those systems to describe accurately, and accuracy is what you want when someone asks an assistant who you are.

The Bing and Copilot advantage is real and specific

This is where MSN differs from a generic high-authority domain. Most large news sites are simply crawled by everyone; msn.com is a Microsoft property inside the ecosystem that Bing indexes and Copilot draws on, which makes the relationship between the placement and the retrieval layer direct rather than incidental. If Bing and Copilot matter to your market, that is a mechanical, explainable reason to choose this outlet over another with a similar authority score. If your buyers live entirely in Google's results, the argument for MSN is recognition rather than retrieval, and you should weigh it on that basis.

MSN is not a newsroom you can pitch and not a wire you can blast; it is a licensed distribution surface, which is why placements here are arranged at the publisher end and read at the Microsoft end.

Compounding rather than one-shot value

A single placement establishes a reference point; a pattern of announcements across different independent domains is what changes how a company gets described in search results and generated answers. Plan MSN as the recognizable anchor in that sequence rather than as the whole of it, with real news attached to each entry.

A Checklist Before You Submit

Run these checks before your release leaves your desk, because every item on the list is something that either delays publication or wastes the placement once it goes live. None of it takes long; all of it is routinely skipped.

Facts and sourcing

• Every number in the release traceable to a document you could produce if challenged
• Every ranking, superlative or market-position claim either sourced or deleted
• Legal entity name, headquarters city and country spelled exactly as they appear on official records
• Quote attributions carrying the speaker's exact current title, checked against your own site
• Any forward-looking statement worded as an expectation rather than as a fact

The card test

Cover everything except your headline, your lead image and the publisher's name, because that is the entire unit an MSN reader is shown before deciding. If a stranger cannot tell from those three elements what happened and whether it concerns them, the placement will publish and go unread. Then check the same headline at phone width to see where it truncates, and confirm the image is yours to license.

Contact details and destination

Give a named contact with a monitored inbox rather than a generic address nobody checks, and make sure the page you link to is the one you want a curious stranger to land on. Strip tracking parameters. Check that the destination explains what the company does above the fold on a phone, because a reader arriving from a Windows widgets panel knows nothing about you and did not intend to find out.

How RedPress Compares

RedPress sells a named destination and returns the address of the published article, which is a different transaction from buying distribution volume and receiving a report. You choose the outlet, you see the terms before you pay, and you can open the result.

Against volume distribution products

Traditional distribution products push one release to a long list of syndication endpoints and report on the push. MSN is the name that shows up most often in those reports, and it is also the name most worth interrogating, because a logo in a coverage summary is not the same object as an article with an address you can open. One question settles it: ask for the URL. Buying a named placement inverts the transaction, producing fewer pages on destinations you deliberately chose, each verifiable by clicking it.

Against direct outreach and agency retainers

Pitching journalists produces the best possible result when it works, because independent reporting carries a weight no purchased placement can match. It also fails often and cannot be scheduled around a launch. What it cannot do at all is reach MSN, since there is no MSN newsroom to pitch and the only route in is through a publisher already licensed into the network. Sensible programs run both: outreach for the coverage that must be earned, placements for the baseline that has to exist on a known date.

What you get back and what to ask first

You get an edited, published article and its live URL, on the outlet named on this page. Before ordering, use live support to confirm the current link policy, your category's eligibility, which regional editions the partner's licence reaches and anything specific to your announcement date. When you are ready to publish a press release on MSN, the fee and turnaround are in the metrics panel above, and support answers the rest before you commit rather than after. If your reason to submit a press release to MSN is a real development with a number attached, this is a straightforward and honest way to get it in front of a very large audience.