These were the top publishers on Facebook in June 2021

With Independence Day now behind us and summer well and truly underway, it’s time to look back at the top publishers on Facebook for June 2021.  

As usual, we used our API and NewsWhip Spike to gather these rankings, which you can read about on our developer hub. This analysis includes English-language content from publishers, ranked by Facebook likes, shares, and comments to their web content, ranked by domain. Additionally, these rankings do not include media natively uploaded to a Facebook Page, such as a Facebook video. Due to a temporary change in how Facebook’s API returns article scores, only articles with more than 100 engagements count towards a publisher’s score this month. This may result in a slight reduction in overall score for all publishers.

That out the way, these are the key takeaways for this month. 

• The Daily Wire remained top of the rankings, well ahead of the competition
• UNICEF had a number of its blogs appear among the top articles
• Video sharing site Rumble continued its consistent presence in the rankings

Let’s look at the data.

The top publishers of June 2021 on Facebook

The Daily Wire was once again comfortably at the top of the rankings, with almost double the level of engagement as any of its competitors for June.

The Daily Wire’s articles received more than 59 million engagements compared to 30 million engagements for the second-placed Daily Mail. Fox News was third in the rankings, with around 25 million engagements. The video sharing website Rumble, for which former President Donald Trump recently signed up, continued its success, ranking at an all time high fourth place in our rankings. 

In terms of what drove the engagement for these top publications, the Daily Wire was once again very political. Their top article, with three quarters of a million engagements, was about politicians calling for athlete Gwen Berry to be removed from the Olympic team for her protest over the national anthem. Among the top five articles, there was one about Ron DeSantis vowing to take on the left (705k), one about a teacher being reinstated in Virginia (639k), one about a Supreme Court decision on Green Cards (587k), and one about CNN’s ratings (585k). 

The Daily Mail was once again somewhat of a law unto itself when it came to its top articles, with relatively little politics among its top stories. The most engaged, with 744k engagements, was about a whale appearing while patient watchers looked the wrong way. There were also stories on Ohio quadruplets graduating from Yale (326k), a shark bite in the Red Sea (279k), LeBron James’s Lakers losing in the playoffs (238k), and Nick Cannon welcoming twins (216k).

For Fox News the pattern was more similar to the other political publishers. Their top story was on Ron DeSantis banning transgender athletes from competition (689k), while they also covered Gwen Berry’s protest (549k), and Portland’s riot squad resigning (232k). Two of the top five stories were from people unfavorably comparing the American education system to those in Communist countries, with examples from North Korea (472k) and China (400k). 

These were the articles that drove success for the top publishers, but what about the top articles overall? 

The top articles on Facebook in June 2021 

UNICEF was even more influential in June than it has been in previous months, with four of the top five articles coming from the agency.

Beyond the UNICEF pieces, the top articles had a broad focus. NPR appeared twice with one piece on Loving Day and one on a valedictorian speaking out against Texas’s new abortion law. The Daily Mail and the Daily Wire’s top pieces made it into the list, while there was also some more ‘soft news’ among the top stories.

The top 25 publishers of June 2021

Overall, the level of engagement with the top publishers is still down from where it was last year.

Conservative publishers featured heavily among the top publishers in June generally. Once again, several British publishers appeared in the top 25, with The Guardian, Daily Mail, the BBC, The Sun, and the Metro all performing strongly.

If you’d like to perform your own analysis of website performance, check out NewsWhip Spike.