Q2 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 big news this quarter is that The Daily Mail has replaced The Daily Wire at the top of the rankings, knocking the conservative publisher off its perch for the first time in almost two years.

It was not even particularly close, with The Daily Mail having more than double the engagement of the former number one, which has struggled to maintain its levels of engagement in the second trimester of 2022.

Not only did The Daily Wire fall in engagement, the Mail also saw a significant rise, moving from around 80 million in Q1 to 113 million in Q2. NBC’s umbrella maintained similar levels quarter over quarter — dropping slightly from 93 million to 88 million.

Of note is also Legit — a Nigerian publisher that rose into the top three publishers for the first time, with 69 million engagements.

The Supreme Court was dominant for a number of its decisions, from a high school football coach that prayed with his players to the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — effectively ending guaranteed access to abortion at the federal level.

Unsurprisingly, the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas was a major topic of conversation and emotional outpouring, as people reacted to the news with sympathy and called for greater gun control in the United States.

The deaths of Goodfellas’ star Ray Liotta and comedian Gilbert Gottfried were other stories that resonated. We have traditionally seen this be a theme, as people share and engage with memories of their favorite actors and performers when they pass away.

It is often the case that the ten top-performing stories do not reflect what happened on a larger scale of the top stories, but that was less true this quarter than it has been in previous quarters.

Guns, celebrity deaths, and politics were all major themes of the top ten, 
and also appeared in the top 100 prominently.

Topics that did not appear in the top ten included the trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and the continued coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which were responsible for 22 of the top 100 stories between them.

There was also a much greater variety in the top 100 than we sometimes see, with the six top themes only responsible for around three quarters of the top stories, where we normally see closer to 90%, meaning the range in high engagement stories was wider than it normally is.

The Inquirer — an English-language newspaper from the Philippines, was the top page overall in Q2, with more than 95 million engagements to its content in the three-month period. Philippine publishers did particularly well amid election season in the country — the Philippine Star also featured and others including ABS-CBN and Rappler would have made the top 15 if we also took into account their bilingual content, with this study limited to English language only.

There were a considerable amount of publishers in the top 15, with a mix of sports and politics. Occupy Democrats’ success continued, only slightly behind The Inquirer, while The Other 98% was also comfortably in the top ten.

Once again, sport was one of the big winners, with a mix of publishers and brands seeing high levels of success on Facebook between April and June, and this was particularly true of soccer.

Native video had made a comeback in Q1, displacing photo as the most common format in the top posts, but photo came roaring back in Q2, with almost half of the top posts as native videos dropping to 4,339 from 4,669 last quarter.

Links were also notable by their absence, dropping around 50% quarter over quarter among the top posts from 703 to 352.