Who Are the Top Publishers on Facebook?

Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world, but it has also established itself as a hub for content that publishers want to put out. NewsWhip has just published a report that talks about all of the biggest publishers on the platform right now, and there are some interesting names on this list with all things having been considered and taken into account. In spite of the fact that this is the case, there are some surprise entries as well.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the Daily Mail continues to be the single biggest publisher on Facebook, and they are also the only platform that received over 100 million engagements during the three months in which this report was compiled. Interestingly, the second biggest platform on Facebook has nothing to do with the Western hemisphere. Rather, this spot belongs to the Nigerian publisher by the name of Legit, and it has received around 80 million engagements in the same interim.

This suggests that more non-Western publishers are starting to gain ground than might have been the case otherwise, and that suggests that Facebook’s target audience is increasingly coming from nations other than the ones that it has traditionally targeted. Legit is not the only African publisher on this list either, with Tuko coming in 6th place with 40 million engagements in a single quarter.

Another platform that saw a lot of engagement was NBC which reached the number 3 spot. The large number of subsidiaries and local news organizations under NBCs belt helped to increase its reach because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up expanding its influence into more territories.

However, it’s not American publishers who are topping these charts. Rather, this list is heavily dominated by British publishers, with African publishers also making a couple of surprise entries. Apart from the Daily Mail’s astounding performance, the Mirror also came in 4th place with just under 60 million engagements in the same period. We can also see the Sun, BBC and Metro ranked quite highly, and that indicates that British publishers have a strong foothold within Facebook that doesn’t seem like it will go away anytime soon.

That should come as no surprise considering that the news story that received the most engagement in 2022 involved the announcement of the passing of British monarch Queen Elizabeth. A post published on Facebook by BBC that broke the news of her death received just under 1 million engagements, or 991,534 to be precise. That is especially impressive considering the post with the second highest number of engagements, which was a post about the White House Press Secretary mentioning a strange jobs statistic, was at just over 670,000.

Soft stories had been receding somewhat, but the third quarter of 2022 saw a resurgence in that niche. That means that human interest stories won out in this quarter with 41% of the stories with top engagement being in that category. 17% of the top stories were about sports, 15% were about the deaths of famous individuals, and 10% were about politics.

Only 3% of the top stories were about the economy, which is interesting considering that the world is going through a period of economic strife this year. Facebook’s users are clearly looking for stories that have a lot of mass appeal, and anything that is overly technical will likely not go over well with the Facebook crowd. That is why pages associated with football teams were the top pages on Facebook, with sports in general dominating this particular category. All in all, Facebook’s status as a content hub is quite secure.
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