Adherence to core professional publishing standards are an essential part of the evaluation process for any brand entering and remaining in the MSN ecosystem. This ensures that our users are receiving the highest quality content and partners can successfully grow their audience with our reach of millions of daily users.
These initial assessments include but are not limited to:
- Descriptive, clear original writing and reporting that includes background information, data and interviews with subjects
- Original photography, illustrations and videos
- Strict adherence to MSN’s Publishing Guidelines
- Editorial oversight and procedures that are shared with, and transparent to, users
- Clear labels to identify content type, such as opinion or analysis
- Crediting photographers and illustrators and specifically identifying who wrote/created the content
- Elevating underserved voices and communities
Issues That Can Negatively Impact Performance
Missing Media Videos highlighted in the headline or body text of a post (or present in the original article site) should be present and viewable on MSN. Unintentionally omitted media embeds may be caused by errors in compliance with the Feed Specifications.
Broken Embeds: Videos using unsupported formats don’t embed correctly and result in display errors
Withheld Content: Posts that claim to feature media content such as slideshows or videos that are missing or that cannot be viewed without clicking through to the original site are misleading and can frustrate readers. Similarly, avoid posting articles that are shortened or summarized on MSN but appear in full on the original site.
Excessive or Misplaced Links: Linkbacks to the original article should not appear within the first three paragraphs of a post, and posts should not feature three or more consecutive links within the body of an article.
Flawed Formatting: Posts that are hard to read will not engage readers and thus will have trouble succeeding. Articles without paragraph or line breaks and badly-encoded special characters should be identified and fixed before ingestion.
Broken Links: HTML formatting errors can result in links displaying as plaintext instead of a clickable URL.
Issues That Can Result in Rejection
Dead Links: Links should be functional and route to the promised destination. Links that do not resolve to functional web pages, or that take the reader somewhere other than the indicated page are not allowed.
Duplicate Media: Ensure that any embedded media is embedded only once. If embedding more than one piece of media, such as images or video clips, make sure that they are related to each other and relevant to the topic indicated in the post title.