How to get a press release on MSN

You cannot place a release on MSN. It has no press-release desk and no press-release path: it licenses partner publishers and re-hosts their pages, so a release arrives only by being published somewhere MSN already carries, under that publisher's byline. It is $449 here, in none of our packages, on the thinnest margin we sell. It also produced the only genuinely dofollow link in our measured mainstream set, on the least durable page in the catalogue.

MSN has no press-release desk and no press-release path. It is an aggregator: it licenses content from partner publishers, who publish on their own sites under Microsoft's rules, and re-hosts it under msn.com/en-us/{section}/{slug}/ar-{id}. A release reaches MSN by first being published somewhere MSN licenses.

The verified example makes the mechanism visible. The MSN page we opened carried:

• the byline "Story by Nadia Brown", and attribution to 2UrbanGirls.com — a small partner publisher, not MSN and not the client;
• a truncated body with a "Continue reading" link back to that publisher's own page;
• no paid label at all, but a partner-publisher badge in its place.

So what you buy when you buy "MSN" is a placement on whichever partner site your vendor can reach, plus the licence that carries it onto MSN's surface. The MSN page is a syndication artefact of the real placement. That is worth understanding before you compare the price to a wire release, because it is a different kind of thing entirely — closer to reprint reach than to a placement.

The link is genuinely dofollow — and it is the only one

We read rel="noopener noreferrer" on the outbound link, with no nofollow token. Under Google's own definition that is a plain, credit-passing link.

Across every mainstream outlet we measured, MSN is the only one where that held. Barchart, Street Insider, Yahoo Finance, Globe and Mail and CoinMarketCap were all nofollow; AP News and Business Insider stripped the link entirely on one wire; Digital Journal published no client anchor at all on one format. MSN is the exception, and our catalogue records it as measured rather than assumed.

That is the good news, and it comes with the bad news attached.

The page may not last

The second MSN URL we checked — indexed, still returned by search, still linked — renders "This story is unavailable". Not a 404: a live page saying the story is gone.

MSN listings roll off when a licence window closes. The re-hosted copy exists as long as the licensing relationship says it does, and that is a decision between MSN and the partner publisher in which neither you nor your distributor has a vote. Anyone selling you a permanent MSN URL is selling something MSN does not offer, and we will not either. What we will do is re-check it and tell you when it goes.

Whether the page can be checked automatically

Partly, and the failure is unusual. MSN's robots.txt is permissive for article paths — the User-agent: * group excludes shopping, preview and internal paths, not news — and it carries no blanket block on AI crawlers. The obstacle is the page itself: MSN serves a JavaScript shell, so an HTTP fetch returns 200 with none of the article text in the body — the app-shell pattern Google warns about, where the initial HTML does not contain the content. Our verifier reads that as unverifiable, not as live, giving MSN an automatic-verification rate of 0.00 for a reason no robots file can fix.

The result is that MSN rows go to a person, who opens the URL in a real browser and reads what rendered. It also means the "This story is unavailable" state is invisible to any script: the status code is 200 either way. Checking it yourself is genuinely the only reliable method on this outlet.

What it costs

MSN is quote-on-request here, and it is in none of our packages. It used to carry a cart price. It no longer does, and the reason is worth stating plainly: our supplier's API sells four named outlets — AP News, USA Today, Barchart and Street Insider — and MSN is not one of them. Every MSN sale was therefore a person emailing a broker, which is exactly the manual step this service is built to not have. Our wholesale is around $250 and the margin was roughly 44%, the thinnest of anything we listed. Ask and we will price it; you will get a date and a figure from a human, not a checkout.

For calibration, a crypto-focused reseller publishes MSN at $99. We are not going to pretend that gap is quality. It is a different supply route with different reliability, and if the lowest cost per logo is your objective, that route exists and this article just told you about it. What our price pays for is that we open the page afterwards, in a browser, and report what actually rendered — which on this outlet is the only check that means anything.

Who should buy it

Buy it if you specifically want a credit-passing link from a large mainstream domain and you understand it may not be permanent. On the measurements we hold, this is the only outlet in the mainstream set that offers one.

Buy it if the audience matters more than the archive — MSN's surface puts a story in front of real readers in a way a wire hub page does not.

Do not buy it if you need the URL to still resolve in a year for a compliance file, an investor data room, or a regulated disclosure. Buy something durable and treat MSN as a bonus.

Do not buy it thinking you bought Microsoft's newsroom. You bought a partner publisher's page, licensed onto MSN, under that publisher's byline.

Do not buy it at all if your budget is small and the goal is credibility. What MSN costs buys Street Insider, Barchart and AP News together, on pages that behave predictably, are orderable the moment you click, and in two of those three cases can actually be checked afterwards.