TikTok has surged ahead as the dominant platform for publisher engagement, moving ahead of Instagram to account for 63% of total engagements from the publisher subset that we looked at.

The two video-focused platforms (TikTok being the obvious) were nearly even in our 2024 report, but with several mainstream publishers seeing growing success on TikTok, its momentum continued through to 2025, with Instagram holding on to 20% this year so far.

Platform performance is different for every publisher, and you can explore more on the chart opposite.

ESPN held onto the top spot with 1.4 billion engagements. This is quite the achievement considering that number accounts for only Q1 of 2025, which is nearly as much engagement that it earned in our longer 2024 report. Even with a much shorter time frame, ESPN’s content strategy is clearly resonating with audiences.

Bleacher Report and The Daily Mail also held onto their second and third places, with 707 million and 610 million engagements respectively.

A new takeaway this quarter is the rise of hard news publishers in the rankings. Fox and ABC have both climbed to higher spots, and CBS and CNN have edged others out in order to secure their own spots among the mix.

The rest of the top 10 web publishers saw similar engagement totals, with the majority earning over 100 million engagements. Although not among the top publishers overall, The Atlantic broke through within the top articles, having four out of 10 all earn hundreds of thousands of engagements.

Overall, among the 50 publishers, engagement was up 38% compared to Q1 2024.

While The Atlantic didn’t crack the top ten in terms of overall engagement, it saw undeniable success with its article links being shared across Facebook and X, and its posts on Instagram. The publisher received 38% of its engagement from web and 29% from Instagram.



The Atlantic’s top article by some distance was about the Signal group chat leak — the biggest story of the quarter from this group — and that narrative also featured in one of the publisher’s other top 10 articles.

This quarter on Facebook:


• News gained traction again, with Fox News having the most engagements
• The top performing posts were still dominated by funny, lighthearted moments
• Publishers leaned on photo content and outperformed video

Fox News surpassed LADbible to take the top spot this quarter, and by quite a large margin, having earned 115 million engagements, an increase of 743% compared to Q1 2024.

LADbible has been a consistent leader on the platform over time, but Fox has found its stride, reporting largely on news around the Trump administration, resulting in Facebook accounting for 37% of the publisher’s total engagement.

Even though Fox led the pack overall, it wasn’t responsible for any of the top 10 posts on the platform, suggesting that it was once again a result of volume and consistency when compared to other publishers on the chart.

As publishers focus their video strategies on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, photo posts have seen a resurgence on Facebook, with photo narrowly surpassing video this quarter, 43% to 40%.

We included live video and embedded video separately this time around, so if we were to combine all video formats then photo and video would be neck and neck. Nonetheless, that doesn’t negate the fact that photo was used much more widely among publishers this quarter.

While this report is mostly about publishers on X, it’s impossible to talk about the platform without mentioning Elon Musk. 

He has 5x more engagement on the platform in Q1 than the publishers we looked at combined, and his tone is often directly confrontational with the media.

Musk’s drive for a new media ecosystem, where anyone and everyone is the media, is one to keep an eye on in terms of the continued evolution of the platform.

Bleacher Report narrowly claimed the top spot from ESPN on Instagram, with over 232 million engagements. Both publishers were far above the rest, though, proving once again how successful sports content is on the platform.

Entertainment publishers also thrive on Instagram, and Vogue is a prime example of one so well suited for the platform’s style, with Instagram accounting for 61% of its total public interest across all platforms.

It was a close race on Instagram, but on TikTok, ESPN is in a league of its own. The publisher earned 1.1 billion engagements on TikTok, and was the only publisher to reach that magnitude on any platform this quarter.

Bleacher Report and The Daily Mail round out the top three, a constant theme throughout this report and consistent to what we have seen in our past analyses. While most of the other publishers average just over 100 million engagements, NBC and CBS have secured higher spots in the ranking, landing above fellow cable outlets that we’ll see later.

As far as entertainment news goes on TikTok, E! led the way, with LADbible its only other competitor on the list.

Celebrity content drives huge engagement for the publisher, as the video opposite shows. E! asked celebrities to sign its camera on the red carpet at the GRAMMY’s, and the video received over 21.7 million engagements on its own.