EmailMicrosoft is abandoning its attempt to be a news provider through msn.com and also regrouping its bing.com apps under the MSN umbrella.
Instead of offering original content, MSN will become a hub for the best content on the web. Among its partners in the venture are the Guardian, CNN and the Wall Street Journal.
And the bing series of apps - news, sport, finance, travel, health, fitness and weather - will use the MSN banner.
The changes represent a u-turn by Microsoft. The MSN portal was meant to deliver content while bing was formed as a news source aggregator. Advertising will also be updated to support Microsoft's push for online ad revenues.
Steve Lynas, MSN's regional director, says: "MSN has used joint-ventures in the past but never on this scale and across so many markets. It's a new business model that helps us court media companies by giving them SEO as well as direct links back to their sites and new revenue streams.
"The MSN brand remains strong. More than 40% of UK internet audiences engage with MSN at least one a month, while 425m people worldwide use the site each month."
But traffic to the MSN portal has evidently been stagnating for the past 12 months with its global ranking - a measure of the average daily visitor and page views over the past three months - dropping from 31 to 34, according to web measurement tool Alexa.
Sources: Wall Street Journal/USA Today/Marketing Week
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