We analyzed 53,962 Facebook posts made by 64 of the world’s top news brands between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018. You can view more data on which news brands generated the most “love,” “sad,” “angry,” “wow” or “haha” reactions here.
Key findings
- The Hill, a US-based political website, is the best performer overall with an average engagement rate of 0.38 percent. Vox (0.32 percent) is second and Buzzfeed (0.30 percent) is third (see more data below).
- The Independent’s video of a toddler stealing popcorn from Prince Harry received more likes (1.3 million) than any other post analyzed (see more data below).
- Fox News generated more “angry” reactions than any other news brand. CNN generated more “sad” reactions, and the Daily Mail generated more “love,” “wow,” and “haha” reactions, than any other news brand (see more data below).
- The BBC has the most page likes of any news brand analyzed and the video post type accounted for 89 percent of total engagements.
- NTD Television attracted the most post likes (12 million) and the Daily Mail generated the most shares (9.2 million) over the timeframe analyzed (see more data below).
- Fox News, the Daily Mail and Breitbart are 1st, 2nd and 3rd for comments over the time frame analyzed.
All news brands ranked by page likes and traffic
All news sites ranked by engagement rate
The Hill, a US-based political news website, had the best average engagement rate over the time frame analyzed. Average engagement rate is calculated by dividing total engagements (likes, comments, shares and reactions) by total page likes.
Vox and Buzzfeed were 2nd and 3rd respectively.
All news sites ranked by post likes, shares and comments
The Daily Mail attracted 9.3 million shares and 2.9 million comments and was the most shared and commented on news brand over the time frame analyzed. Right-wing websites typically best for comments overall, with The Daily Mail, Fox News and Breitbart the top 3 news brands for total post comments.
Meanwhile, NTD Television (12.1 million), The Daily Mail (8.8 million) and the BBC (8.1 million) were 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively for total post likes.
All news sites ranked by total post reactions
Of the news sites we analyzed, Fox News generated the most anger while CNN generated more sadness than any other news site.
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail generated the most “love,” “haha” and “wow” reactions.
All posts ranked by likes, shares, comments and reactions
Most liked: This video from the Independent of a toddler stealing Prince Harry’s popcorn generated the most post likes (1,255,877) over the time frame analyzed. CBS News’ video about a community buying a car for a young employee of a fast food chain was second.
- Most anger: The Hill’s live coverage on the vote to repeal net neutrality generated more anger than any other post (52,216 angry reactions) while Buzzfeed’s video on teenagers being banned from prom because of their hair was second (45,128 angry reactions).
- Most shared: This video from the Daily Mail of a pet owner trying to pet his dog while the dog gnaws his fingers received more shares than any other post analyzed (2,094,847). The video from CBS News about police officers interacting with an elderly man was second (1,180,037 shares).
- Most commented on: The Daily Mail’s video about a dog owner (above) was also the most commented on update (it received 591,368 comments). The Daily Mail’s video about a house decorated with Christmas puns (146,137 comments) was the second most commented on post over the time frame analyzed.
- Most sadness: BuzzFeed’s video about Chester Bennington generated more sadness than any other post (89,276 sad reactions). CNN’s video about Rick Saldivar, who lost six family members to Hurricane Harvey, was second (63,672 sad reactions).
- Most love: CBS News’ videos about a community gifting a car to a young fast food employee received more love reactions than any other post (491,692 love reactions). Another CBS News post, this time about police officers interacting with an elderly man (378,000 love reactions), was second.
- Most amazement (wow reactions): This video from the Daily Mail of a BMX biker failing to land a front flip received more “wow” reactions than any other post (44,397 wow reactions). This video timelapse of an electrical storm from ABC News was a very close second (44,333 wow reaction).
- Most laughter: The video from the Daily Mail about a dog and its owner (above) generated the most laughter or any post analyzed (475,136 haha reactions). The video from the Independent of a toddler stealing Prince Harry’s popcorn was second (291,000 haha reactions).
The best post types by total engagements
Overall, the video post type accounted for 89 percent of engagements while the link post type accounted for 8 percent.
More details and methodology
The news sites selected were pulled from Alexa’s top 50 rankings and we excluded sites that rely on user-generated content or have a global Alexa rank higher than 5,000.
We restricted our analysis to English language websites and, to supplement Alexa’s top 50 list, we also selected news sites from Alexa’s regional lists for Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US.
