How the Daily Mail’s TikTok dominates UK publishing engagement

Following on from our recent report looking at 50 of the top publishers across the web and social, we’ve done a deep dive into 10 of the biggest UK publishers.

For this research, we took content from The Daily Mail, The Economist, The Guardian, BBC News, GB News, Channel 4 News, Sky News, ITV News, and Joe.co.uk’s Facebook, X, TikTok, and Instagram accounts, as well as their web articles, measured their engagements, and pulled out some patterns.

So what did we learn?

Daily Mail’s TikTok is a UK publishing behemoth

The Daily Mail poses us a bit of a problem in trying to look at the aggregate numbers for this study, as its TikTok has roughly the gravitational pull of a neutron star with more than a billion engagements this year.

Of the roughly 2 billion engagements these publishers have had in 2024 so far, a little shy of 1.4 billion of those engagements were with TikTok content. So 74% of content engagement was on the video platform, with an additional 13% coming from Instagram.

The Daily Mail’s billion-engagement success story means its TikTok alone has driven more than half the total engagement with this group of UK publishers on a single channel.

It’s not that other publishers and platforms didn’t see success — millions of engagements are nothing if not impressive — it’s just the Daily Mail’s success on this one platform distorts the lens through which we’re able to view and perceive all other content.

Publisher engagement by platform

The graphs below show the breakdown of engagement by publisher on each platform. The Daily Mail’s success on TikTok means we need to look at these in three different charts so we can see what’s going on.

The below chart looks at engagement across web, Facebook, and X for these ten publishers.

 

BBC News, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail all performed well with their web content, with the BBC and The Daily Mail both topping out at around 40 million engagements.

Joe.co.uk performed best with its Facebook Page, where it had the second most engagement of any of the publishers we looked at, with 12 million.

Comparatively, GB News and Sky News saw the most success on X with their main accounts, though the raw numbers were lower for almost every publisher than they were on other platforms.

The highest engagement levels come on Instagram and TikTok. We’ve already talked about the Daily Mail, but the BBC’s overperformance on Instagram is also notable. The British publishing institution is well ahead of any of the other accounts we looked at, with more than 150 million engagements, when none of the others have more than 28 million.

TikTok engagement by publisher

When it comes to TikTok, it’s worth emphasizing that other publishers do still get tens of millions engagements on the platform, they just cannot compete for scale with the Daily Mail.

For example, the BBC News account has 114 million engagements on TikTok — not far below its Instagram performance — while ITV News has 147 million. These should still be seen as huge success stories, despite looking comparatively smaller than they otherwise would thanks to the Mail.

It’s all well and good talking about the big numbers, but what’s actually driving the success? As you’d expect, it varies by platform. On web, top articles this year have included Princess Kate’s cancer treatment (BBC, 355k), tributes being paid to Maggie Smith following her death (BBC, 290k), and The Economist’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (178k).

The focus on web tended to be on celebrity news (particularly deaths), and politics, with the US election drawing a lot of attention. But what about the other platforms?

Relatable content breaks through on Facebook

Facebook is a broad audience — it remains the biggest social network by a distance, and as such it follows that the most successful content there appeals to a wide range of people.

The posts below from the Daily Mail and Joe.co.uk are emblematic of that, taking situations that users can relate to and reporting on them.

The Daily Mail’s video showcased a young boy asking a delivery driver for help after his mum fainted, while Joe’s post highlighted a common problem for drivers — bright headlights. Both of these topics are likely to resonate with users who have similar experiences, and it’s reflective of the type of content that performed well on the platform broadly.

The Economist’s Pakistan coverage breaks through on X

X was nothing like Facebook in terms of its most successful content, and that’s because it was dominated by one topic — Imran Khan’s arrest in Pakistan. This was a highly divisive topic, and clearly drove huge interest around the world, as eight of the top ten posts on X comprised The Economist’s coverage of the topic at the beginning of the year.

GB News also saw a lot of success on the platform, generally with quite populist or political content, featuring the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Nigel Farage, and David Starkey talking about the UK, on topics such as taxing farmers, bus fairs, and British traditions.

The Daily Mail goes international on TikTok

While this analysis focuses on British publishers, that does not mean it is limited to content about the UK.

The Daily Mail actually sees great success with its international coverage, which was a big driver of engagement for the publisher.

Of the top ten videos for The Mail on the video platform, nine of the ten focused on events from countries around the world (including the US, New Zealand, Israel, and China). Only one — about the death of Maggie Smith — took a British person as its subject. This shows the advantage of not limiting coverage, and leaning into international topics of interest, especially in short-form video.

The BBC leads with culture on Instagram

The BBC was by some distance the most successful publisher on Instagram, and its culture coverage was the primary driver of that success. Its top two posts were about a Golden Globe win for Hayao Miyazaki, and a high-profile wedding in India.

This trend went well beyond these two posts though, including an Oscar win for Cillian Murphy and Al Pacino having a Shrek phone case.

Eight of the top ten Instagram posts were from the BBC News account, with only The Daily Mail able to disrupt its streak of success. The Mail’s posts were both about YouTube trends, including a weight loss video from Nikocado Avacado and IShowSpeed coming fourth in the famous cheese-rolling race.

The new rules of engagement

Our analysis of UK publishers reveals some unexpected trends in the digital media landscape:

1. The engagement with news content on TikTok suggests that serious journalism can thrive in short-form video formats. It’s not just trendy dances in 2024.
2. National publishers are finding success with international content, challenging the notion that local news dominates engagement.
3. The success of relatable, everyday content alongside hard news marks a shift in what audiences consider newsworthy.
4. Platform audiences have their own niches and points of interest, with success on one platform not guaranteeing it on another, even if otherwise optimized for multiple platforms.

Social media is constantly changing, and the fragmentation of the landscape means publishers need to continuously reevaluate their content strategies, platform priorities, and even their definition of news to stay relevant.

For more on this topic, you can find our full, global analysis of 50 publishers in our report here.