Q1 2022

As usual, we must caveat this somewhat by noting that some of these are in subsidiaries for the big cable publishers. This means that NBC contains local news stations under its umbrella, as does Fox News.

The Daily Wire was the top publisher of the quarter once again, though with substantially fewer engagements than it had in Q4, dropping from 109 million to 98 million.

NBC also saw a decrease in engagement, but a much less drastic one, dropping from 97 million to 94 million, making it a closer race this time around.

The Daily Mail was the closest publisher to these two frontrunners, with 
all the other top publishers some distance behind.

The former of these saw more stories in the top ten, as people nostalgically shared their memories of celebrities who had passed away, including the likes of Bob Saget, Meat Loaf, and Sidney Poitier. 

News of Bob Saget’s death reported by TMZ was the only individual story to receive more than a million engagements.

The war in Ukraine was also a big narrative among the most engaged stories, though these tended to have an individual focus too, rather than being broad war reporting.

Examples of this included a Ukrainian actor who was killed after signing up to defend his country, and a Scottish grandfather who traveled to Ukraine to fight the Russians. 

Outside of these two narratives, a potential cure for HIV was the main story that broke through into the top ten.

The invasion of Ukraine was the most commonly occurring thread among the top 100 web articles on Facebook in Q1 2022, with 21 of the top 100 being about Russia’s invasion of the country.

Politics that did not include Ukraine was the other theme that dominated the top headlines, with another 21 of the top stories being about mostly US-based politics and policy.

Although celebrity deaths were responsible for five of the top ten stories overall, that ratio fell off dramatically when it came to the top 100, with only 11 in total. This shows that while individual stories are highly engaged, there do not tend to be as many of them.

Soft news was again down, with only 11 of the top stories, while the sports resurgence continues, making it into our themes as a standalone topic.

The ‘other’ category includes legal, healthcare, and general news, among other minor topics.

Whereas in other quarters, individuals and big meme pages have been dominant on Facebook, in Q1 2022 we saw significantly more publishers appearing at the top end of the ranking. 

The most engaged page was Occupy Democrats, which had more than 80 million engagements. This is an increase on the 78 million engagements that saw it come fourth in our last rankings.

One page whose engagement disappeared entirely was Women Working, who topped the list with more than 100 million engagements last time out, but could not even make the top fifteen this time. The page’s engagement dropped by more than 70% quarter over quarter, coming out at around 230 million engagements this time around. 

The top five was rounded out by news and politics accounts, with The Other 98%, The Dodo, LADbible, and Ben Shapiro all featuring. 

As at the end of 2021, sports accounts did feature, though not quite as prominently this time around. Where they did appear, it tended to be soccer accounts that performed best.

Photo has fallen away as the top post this quarter, after several successive quarters as the most popular post type among the top 10,000 posts. 

The number of native videos in the top posts has risen from just under 4,000 in Q4 to more than 4,600 this quarter — a marked increase that puts it comfortably top of the pile.

The number of photos dropped by hundreds, making it the second most popular, while links remained roughly steady at around 700.