We explain how we compile the monthly figures, and what they mean.
What are NewsWhip’s Social Rankings?
Each month, we publish lists of the top social publishers of the previous month, covering Facebook and sometimes other platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The rankings are based on the number of shares, tweets, comments and other interactions accrued to content published by each site in the relevant month. The rankings give an interesting view of who’s attracting the most attention on Facebook and other major social platforms. They can help contribute to understanding what works on social.
What Content is Covered?
For Facebook, we combine the total number of likes, shares, comments, and reactions on content published during that month alone.
For Facebook, if someone on your site uses an on-site share button to share an article to their timeline, that action counts as one share. If someone copy-pastes the link directly to Facebook, that share will count in the exact same way.
The rankings have nothing to do with the number of people who ‘like’ a publication’s Facebook page that month, although that may have some effect on how engaged your audience is with your content. A publisher with many “likes” has better audience access and may have the access needed to drive more activity around their content.
For Twitter, we count the total number of tweets from influencer accounts that include links to each publisher’s articles from that month, and the retweets those tweets get.
For LinkedIn, we look at shares, and for Pinterest, at pins. For Instagram, we look at likes and comments.
For all sites, the figures relate solely to content published during the month in question alone. Older content that continued going viral, or archived material posted without a new URL will not taken into account. This may disadvantage publishers of very long-term, long tail content in the rankings.
Where Does the Data Come from?
All the data comes from NewsWhip Spike and Analytics, our professional content discovery platforms.
Spike monitors about 200,000 stories per hour, in over 60 languages, categorising content from each one by country, topic and publisher, and gathering data on topics, authors, and videos associated with each story. We track the speed at which each story spreads on Facebook and Twitter, as well as native content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.
Spike users can see what content is engaging users in any niche topic or location, and so can put their periscope up and view trends on any site or sites across the web. They can get on viral trends extremely fast, as Spike has been scientifically proven to predict 79 percent of viral breakout stories within an hour of publication.
Each month, we compile the total number of articles published by all sites and detected by Spike, and the social data associated with them. We restrict the monthly published rankings to interactions with English-language content only for now, though we’ve done rankings for other languages and countries as well.
For tagging, we define a publisher’s region by its website address, Twitter location, LinkedIn location, and the like. This covers publishers with diaspora or expat audiences. For example, RT Spain wouldn’t be included as an Spanish publisher as its social channels give no indication it’s based in Spain. There can be a bit of confusion with this, but we will always tag by where the publisher is located.
What Sites Do We Cover?
The NewsWhip team has been building and adding to our database of content since 2012, so it’s quite comprehensive. We cover all major blogs, news websites, viral content publishers, and now monitor the content produced by many brands and marketers.
However, gaps can emerge — a new website, or a major overhaul of an old one might slip through our net. If you want to make sure your site’s content is tracked by us and so will be included in these rankings, contact us.
Here’s what we currently track, as of February 2018:
- Website Content: 500k+ sites and feeds. This includes news & media, major blogs and brands from over 120 countries in 60+ languages
- Facebook: 240k+ Facebook Pages including, but not limited to, verified Facebook Pages
- Twitter: 286k+ Twitter accounts, including all verified accounts
- Youtube: 32k+ YouTube Channels
- Instagram: 55k+ Instagram accounts, up to Q2 2018
How are Publishers Defined?
Most sites’ figures are self-explanatory. For the New York Times, their data relates to all stories published on nytimes.com, as well as the New York Times’ blogs and sub-sections (sport, business, fashion and so on). Same for other sites with a single domain, like Mashable and TMZ.
Some sites have more than one edition or domain, such as the Mail Online’s US and UK editions, The Huffington Post’s UK and Canadian versions, or BuzzFeed US and UK. In these cases, all English language sites are combined to give a final total for the parent site.
Some network sites have more than one domain contributing to their total monthly figure. In this case, we combine all subsidiary domains as one publisher, provided all are publishing under the parent brand.
For instance, here’s a list of the sites classified as NBC as of June 2014:
NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Sports, Today.com, NBC Olympics, NECN.com, NBC Connecticut, NBC New York, NBC Philadelphia, NBC Washington, NBC Miami, NBCDFW, NBC Chicago, NBC Bay Area, NBC Los Angelus, NBC San Diego.
We have a large number of sites classified under some umbrellas – to check how we are monitoring and attributing content to your media brand, please email us.
Note that to unite a publisher under a single umbrella, there must be a common masthead or brand. For example, News Corporation is not treated as a single publisher, but its subsidiary media brands are.
What Other Data Do You Collect?
NewsWhip collects detailed data for all publishers and has records for all content published since a point in 2013. We can provide detailed reports, and are working on a new system to give publishers direct access to all our data. Currently, it may be accessed through our POST Endpoints API.
If you wish to request API access or commission a data report, send us an email. From analysing which writers or publishers are popular on different channels over time, or just monitoring your own site’s growth, this data can be of great use.
