Now more than ever, empowering a free, trusted, well-funded news industry is critical to moving the world forward. That’s why we’re so excited about today’s announcement to expand Microsoft’s support of journalism including new investments in underserved communities.
News + Microsoft: A long partnership
As we celebrate these new initiatives, it’s important to note that this isn’t the start of Microsoft’s commitment to supporting the news industry, but rather the next step in a journey that we began in 2014, when we stopped creating original content for MSN to focus exclusively on licensing, curating, and promoting content from publishers across the news industry. Our model was – and is – simple:
- License content from our worldwide community of over 4,500 media brands.
- Use a mix of algorithms and human insight to combine and curate that content into news feeds that power our experiences on the web, desktop, and mobile.
- Integrate high quality advertising and share revenue with our publishing partners.
Through this approach, we’re proud to have shared over $1B with our community of 4,500+ global publishing partners since 2014.
Unparalleled breadth, depth, and quality of content
Today, Microsoft News is the world’s #1 desktop news service *, reaching over 500M users every month in 180 countries and 31 languages across MSN, Bing News, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Launcher, the Windows lock screen, apps for Windows, iOS, and Android, and popular third-party mobile OEMs, mobile carriers, and browsers. Those experiences are powered by more than 170,000 pieces of unique, professionally-created content that our publishing community contributes every day on dozens of topics, like global breaking news, national and local reporting, sports, weather, finance, health, science, food, and more.
What’s next?
We’re constantly looking for new ways to empower the industry – be it through innovations that leverage AI to drive faster and more complete investigative reporting, helping newsrooms modernize their storytelling through the power of data journalism, reinventing our apps for new device categories like Surface Duo, or expanding our platform to include news and content for emerging verticals, like Esports. Most importantly, we’re deeply investing in our core platform and distribution partnerships to ensure that our publishing partners’ world-class content can reach more people, on more devices, in more languages and geographies than ever before.
We remain committed to providing sustainable revenue to newsrooms and publishers around the world and are proud to support their mission to produce high-quality journalism.
Taroon Mandhana, Corporate Vice President
