These were the top publishers on Facebook in June 2022

The Daily Mail continued its early summer dominance in our June 2022 Facebook publisher rankings, finishing the month with significantly more engagements than any of its competitors. 

Here are some of the key takeaways for this month

• The Daily Mail had as many engagements as its two closest competitors combined
• The top ten articles all had under a million engagements
• African publishers made up three of the top ten

Let’s take a closer look at the data. 

The top publishers of June 2022

The Daily Mail’s success continued into the start of the summer, gaining engagements vs. May and extending its lead against its closest competitors on the platform.

The top three publishers were actually well ahead of the rest of the top ten, with third-placed Daily Mirror having 19 million engagements compared to Fox News’ 13 million. The publishers occupying spots four through ten all had between 10 and 13 million engagements. 

African publishers have seen particular success recently, and that continued here, with three of the top ten coming from Kenya and Nigeria, while four came from the US.

In terms of the top articles, The Daily Mail’s colossal engagement was headed by coverage of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. In fact, only one of the publisher’s top five articles — a piece about Kate Middleton’s pre-Jubilee outfit with 232k engagements — was not about the trial. The other four were all about the trial or the fallout and included Depp joining TikTok to thank fans (491k), his Dior ad reentering the market (317k), celebrations with Robert Downey Jr. (294k), and reports of him winning his defamation case (308k).

Legit was focused on viral Nigerian stories, with human interest pieces front and center. These included a corn seller’s English level (272k), a woman dancing in her room (251k), and photos of quadruplets (165k). Education was often a theme, with another story about a woman going to law school (223k), and a boy given a full scholarship to university (172k).

The Daily Mirror’s success in these rankings has always been driven by its sports coverage at the top end of its engagement, and that was the case again here. Its top five stories were all about soccer, and included pieces on Benzema thanking Ronaldo (140k), Aubameyang’s Barcelona fate (139k), Marcelo’s send off (138k), Ronaldo’s record (130k), and Salah’s message to Mane (122k).

Surprisingly, very few of these themes appeared in the top articles overall, so let’s take a look at those now. 

The top articles of June 2022 on Facebook

A Supreme Court decision was a prominent feature of the top articles on Facebook, though perhaps not the one that might be expected.

The court’s decision to side with a high school football coach who led his players in prayer was the top story and came from Fox News with 968k engagements. While it may be surprising that Roe v. Wade does not feature in the top 15 articles, this is because it was spread over a greater range of articles, and covered much more broadly. 

Politico’s piece leaking the decision in May was the second most engaged article of the month and had around the same level of engagement as June’s top article. There were 75k articles written from the time of the decision on June 24th until the end of June, with 12 million engagements, so people were sharing and engaging with a much broader range of coverage rather than a single principal article.

Other articles which featured were a mixture of brand content and the Daily Mail’s coverage of Johnny Depp, which as we have seen saw significant levels of engagement.

The top 25 publishers of June 2022

The chart below shows the top 25 publishers of June and the number of articles they published.

Notable here is the Daily Wire’s continued struggle to reach the heights it hit in 2021 and early 2022, as well as mainstream news outlets including the New York Times, the BBC, and NPR all struggling to make it into the top ten. 

News from around the world continued to flourish, with around a third of the top publishers coming from outside the US and UK. 

Facebook is just one facet of the online ecosystem. To explore further, check out our most recent Reddit rankings.