Legit hangs onto the top spot in our November Facebook publisher rankings

Legit just about hung onto its ranking as the top publisher on Facebook, holding off a strong challenge from The Daily Mail in November. 

Once again, engagement was largely lower than it had been in October, with most of the top publishers seeing fewer interactions with their content in November than they did the previous month. 

Here are some of the key takeaways for November: 

• Legit held off a challenge from The Daily Mail to maintain its status as top publisher 
• TMZ featured a number of times among the top articles, with celebrity deaths dominating top headlines
• British publishers continue to outperform American counterparts at the top end of the scale

Let’s look a little deeper.

The top publishers on Facebook in November 2022

Legit’s 17 million engagements were enough to keep it at the top of the list of most engaged publications for November 2022, despite The Daily Mail also receiving around 17 million.

This actually represented a growth in The Daily Mail’s engagement, rising from 15.9 to 17.1 million engagements, while Legit’s fell from almost 21 million in October to 17.5 million in November, which is what made this such a close race between the two clear frontrunners.

Having been second in October’s rankings, The Daily Mirror fell back to third, but still maintained a considerable lead over the rest of the competition, as the only other publisher to break 10 million engagements on the platform. 

Another top performer in the top ten was People magazine, which cracked the top five publishers for the second month in a row and was the most engaged American publication overall in November. This was thanks to its coverage of celebrity news, which drove it to almost 8 million engagements. 

In terms of the top publishers, Legit’s success was driven by a woman celebrating three years of an akara business (259k), a mum giving birth (161k), a viral video about a school (155k), a man whose daughter looked like Sabirus (150k), and a shop assistant who worked at one store for 20 years getting a huge bonus from customers (144k). Social media was a clear driver of success for the publisher both in terms of engagement and content sourcing, as videos and photos going viral were a big part of what their most engaged stories were about. 

The Daily Mail was focused on celebrities and human interest stories in November, with its top article being about a border collie that wandered into a police station after being reported missing (135k). Other top stories included Woody Harrelson hugging Michael J.Fox after presenting him with an award (120k), a Messi/Ronaldo advert for Louis Vuitton (94k), and a new Warwick Davis series on Disney+ (85k). 

The third biggest story for the publisher was about a boy born at 11:11 on 11/11 turning 11, which somewhat sadly did not live up to its destiny and slightly surpassed the optimal engagement number of 111k to receive 113k engagements.

The Daily Mirror’s focus on sport paid off again as its five top stories were all about soccer, with the World Cup a big part of that success. Sadio Mane’s gift of signed shirts to his home village was the top article with 84k, but there were also stories about Casemiro and the Brazil team (80k), Phil Foden’s World Cup ambition (78k), a match report from Brazil-Serbia (78k), and Edinson Cavani’s feelings on Cristiano Ronaldo (74k). 

But what about the top stories overall? Let’s take a look. 

The top articles on Facebook in November 2022

The top articles on Facebook in November 2022 were quite mixed, but mourning the passing of family or celebrities was a common theme.

TMZ featured prominently in the top articles, with three of the top pieces being about the death of celebrities, while the top piece overall was from The Pioneer Woman talking about the passing of a grandparent. 

Interestingly, for a month that contained an extremely hotly contested midterm election, there was no politics news of note among the top articles on Facebook for the month. 

The top 25 publishers of November 2022

Below is a chart showing the top 25 publishers of November, along with the number of articles written. 

There has not been much change month over month in the world’s top 25 publishers, with many major American publications hovering just outside the top ten overall. 

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