Daily Star on news aggregator MSN on 30 March 2026.
Content syndication to MSN has become one of the biggest sources of online advertising revenue for Reach thanks in part to the success of the Daily Star on the platform.
Daily Star senior reporter Adam Cailler now works full-time on tailoring content for web portal MSN.com which, like Yahoo, republishes content from a variety of publishers and shares ad revenue with them.
MSN.com is the third-biggest English-language news website in the world and, since 2020, has been edited by AI-driven robots.
It is possible for publishers to earn higher rates via advertising from content published on MSN than on their own sites because MSN operates its own advertising ecosystem based on first-party data from logged-in users.
The success at MSN comes amid plummeting Google Discover referral traffic hitting digital revenue at Reach , with overall page views down by 8% in the second half of 2025 across the network.
Cailler has spent the past six months dedicated to managing Daily Star content on MSN, which he said at times surpasses the brand’s own website in terms of article views.
“I’m not just the first at the Star, I’m basically the first at Reach to just be dedicated to nothing but MSN for a job,” he said.
The role came about after Cailler realised a lot of Daily Star content could not be automatically fed through to the platform due to its strict filters.
“Thus my six-month journey through the joy of MSN and trying to figure out their filters and monitoring and making it… quite a big earner for us. And it’s just developed from there.”
His role involves monitoring what is working on MSN over a 24-hour period, tailoring content and commissioning stories aimed at this specific audience.
MSN bans ‘adult content’ and swearing
Filters cause MSN robot editors to take a dim view of some Daily Star content unless it is tailored for the platform, Cailler said.
“Like no sex, [nothing] remotely showing skin, no swearing, none of that kind of content can go on MSN,” he said. “It’s about tailoring our daily content to that as well, and then catching anything that goes through, removing it or seeing how we can make it work, which is why it’s a full-time job.”
Categories that do well on MSN include politics, crime, news and retail, as well as “weird murders”, stories about aliens, showbiz and royal content.
“Put it this way, we thought the Daily Star audience from 2023 to 2025 had disappeared… but they’re on MSN.”
But Cailler said: “The AI site filters can be a little bit of a pain, because one day it’ll tell you something’s not allowed.” The same content may then be approved the next day with no explanation.
Cailler said any content about comedian Paddy McGuinness is blocked due to the platform’s US-based filters, as “Paddy is not a word they like in the US”.
“That side of the AI is a bit of a nightmare to be honest,” he said, describing it as “a little prudish”.
To combat this, the Daily Star tailors content to be MSN-friendly and “adult content”, such as columns from sex columnist Just Jane, does not get published on MSN.
The title has also developed an in-house button that hides an article from MSN.
Content is formatted differently due to the way MSN places ad blocks: “it’s far more ad-friendly” than a website, said Cailler. Articles are written as three paragraphs followed by an image.
These changes haven’t “damaged anything on site”, said Cailler, “because our ad filters have also been adapted over the year to work that same way”.
The Daily Star began rolling out video content to MSN in March, which involves converting written pieces to video through AI (which creates a script and voiceover to a slideshow of images) and creating bespoke content with journalists presenting news stories to test what works on the platform.
While Callier believes MSN is “a platform that will last”, the audience can be “fickle”.
“The MSN strategy is a bit of a ‘take it as it comes’ every day… see what happens, and if it’s working, do more of it,” said Cailler.
He added that this benefits content on the website because if it works on MSN, “we do tend to see a pickup on-site as well”.
Adam Cailler, senior reporter and MSN lead at the Daily Star. Picture: Cailler.
The Daily Star monetises content on MSN through page views for stories, but engagement for videos, where revenue is generated after a viewer watches for a set period.
Cailler and editor-in-chief Ben Rankin set a year-long target for page views, but hit it within a month “because we were so focused on it”, Cailler said.
Despite other news aggregators being available, such as Yahoo and Google News, Cailler said the focus is on MSN “because the ad revenue is really good compared to the others”.
“The ad revenue is even more than Meta,” he said. “Generally, across Reach, it’s become one of the biggest earners.”
Page-view numbers on MSN are “pretty much, most days, on par with our own site”, he said, with these numbers sometimes surpassing the site.
In February, the Daily Star ranked 23rd out of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK with an audience of 6.7 million, according to Ipsos iris data . This was up 73% year on year.
The title has undergone a year of change under Rankin since he joined in March 2025, including a major redesign, a new strapline “News with a wink”, less racy content with the end of page three models, and more hard news and big stories.
Putin story hit nearly a million MSN page views
One story that performed particularly well on MSN was written by Cailler about Vladimir Putin’s alleged body double , sourced from an anonymous Kremlin Telegram account.
He said the conspiracy theory, which has been pushed out on the main Daily Star site with various angles for years, performed well for a couple of months so was syndicated to MSN.
“We brought it back for MSN to test what would happen, and it absolutely flew,” said Cailler, adding it hit “nearly a million page views”.
Cailler believes MSN is “a platform that will last” and is a solid bet for publishers.
“If you think about it, every Windows or every Microsoft computer has MSN… we’ve worked out our audience is mainly [active] from 8am till around 6pm-ish, which is working hours. So, unless everyone stops working, or everyone switches to a Mac, this is a pretty long-term thing.”
Aggregators like MSN could be the future for some publishers, Cailler added.
“We have thought a few times over the years of becoming an off-site platform, because sometimes the page views on MSN are actually more than our own site.
“So that could be an avenue, especially when you’ve got Yahoo and all those other off-site platforms… if you’re making more revenue from there, then why not focus on it more?”
Email [email protected] to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog