MSN doesn’t report its revenue as a standalone product. Microsoft bundles MSN’s earnings into a broader category called “search and news advertising,” which brought in $12.6 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2024. That figure combines revenue from Bing search ads, the MSN website, and the Microsoft Start news feed that appears in Windows and the Edge browser.
Why MSN’s Exact Revenue Is Hard to Pin Down
Microsoft organizes its finances into three major segments, and MSN falls under “More Personal Computing.” Within that segment, the company reports a single line item for search and news advertising revenue. It doesn’t break out how much comes from Bing search results versus how much comes from display ads on MSN.com or the Microsoft Start feed. This means there’s no public number for MSN alone.
What we do know is the combined figure: $12.576 billion for fiscal year 2024. That number has been climbing steadily. In the most recent quarter reported (ending September 2025), search and news advertising revenue grew 15% year over year, driven by higher search volume and partnerships with third-party companies that use Bing’s search technology. Over the prior fiscal year, the growth rate was around 12% after subtracting the costs Microsoft pays to partners who send traffic its way.
What Drives MSN’s Advertising Revenue
MSN makes money almost entirely through advertising. When you visit MSN.com, open a new tab in Microsoft Edge, or see the news feed on your Windows lock screen, you’re looking at Microsoft Start content. The ads placed alongside those articles, weather forecasts, and stock tickers generate revenue for Microsoft. The platform reaches a massive audience: Microsoft claims 1.4 billion monthly active users across its ecosystem, though that number includes everyone using Windows, Edge, Outlook, and other products, not just people actively reading MSN.
The real advantage MSN has is distribution. It’s the default homepage for Edge and appears automatically on Windows devices. Every new PC sold with Windows pre-installed is a potential pair of eyes on MSN content. Edge has been slowly gaining browser market share, which feeds more users into Microsoft’s ad ecosystem and increases query volume through Bing. These aren’t users who sought out MSN. They’re people who landed there because Microsoft put it in front of them, and that built-in audience is valuable to advertisers.
How MSN Compares to Competitors
Microsoft’s advertising business is still a fraction of Google’s, which generates well over $200 billion annually from ads. But it’s growing faster. In one recent quarter, Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenue grew 21% year over year, while Google’s ad business grew 10.4% over the same period. That gap reflects Microsoft’s smaller base (it’s easier to grow quickly when you’re starting from less) but also the momentum from integrating AI tools into Bing and Edge.
Compared to other news aggregators like Yahoo News or Apple News, MSN benefits from being woven directly into an operating system used by over a billion people. Yahoo still draws significant traffic, but it lacks the kind of system-level integration that funnels users to MSN automatically.
How Publishers Get Paid
MSN doesn’t produce most of its own content. It licenses and aggregates articles from news publishers, then places ads around that content. Microsoft shares a portion of the ad revenue with those publishers, but the company has never publicly disclosed the exact split. Tim Frank, Microsoft’s corporate VP of AI monetization, has described the arrangement as a “transparent value exchange,” though the company has withheld specific fee schedules and payout formulas.
Microsoft has introduced a marketplace model where publishers can set their own pricing for AI-related content licensing, with granular usage reporting and voluntary participation. But the traditional MSN news feed arrangement remains opaque in terms of how much individual publishers actually receive per article or per page view. This has been a long-standing point of tension between news organizations and tech platforms more broadly.
Estimating MSN’s Slice of the Pie
Industry analysts have attempted to estimate how much of Microsoft’s $12.6 billion in search and news advertising comes specifically from the news side. Most of that revenue is generated by Bing search ads, since search advertising commands higher prices per click than display ads on news pages. A reasonable estimate places MSN and Microsoft Start’s contribution somewhere in the low single-digit billions, though Microsoft has never confirmed any breakdown.
What’s clear is that MSN remains a significant property for Microsoft, not necessarily because of the direct revenue it generates, but because it keeps users inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. Every minute someone spends reading news on MSN is a minute they’re not on Google, and that has strategic value beyond the ad dollars alone.