For this installment of our top publisher rankings we looked at the media landscape in Ireland and the UK.
The rankings come from a mix of the NewsWhip API and NewsWhip Spike, and encompass the aggregated likes, shares, and comments on the content produced by the publishers in the rankings.
Top publishers in Ireland
We’ll start with Ireland, where media powerhouse RTE took the top spot with 1.5M total interactions in 2022. RTE is the national broadcaster of Ireland as it is overseen by the Irish government. Their stories on politics, sport, entertainment, and beyond make massive waves on social media and the web.
The Irish Times came in a close second with 1.3M total interactions, focusing on more serious topics like national politics, Irish business happenings, and global news. Independent.ie rounded out the top three with 889K interactions, with similar stories to that of RTE.
Other publications like the Dublin specific Dublin Live and the well-rounded Irish Examiner floated towards the middle of the pack.
Towards the bottom came the tabloids, with The Sun and RSVP Live coming in with a mere 374k total interactions between the two of them. These publications often focus on celebrity gossip and entertainment news; obviously not a major concern in Ireland.
Top publishers in the UK
Quite the contrary to Ireland’s smaller rankings, the UK’s top publishers had an enormous amount of clicks this year. The Daily Mail generated over 300M total interactions, with 295M of those coming from Facebook. The Mirror, another popular newspaper, came in second with 155M interactions, and 153M coming from Facebook.
Similar to Ireland, the UK’s The Sun also came in the top 5 with 76M interactions. Other publications included American favorite The Guardian, a strictly English football site football.london, and The Independent.
It’s interesting to note that even the publications towards the bottom of the top ten still had 30M+ more interactions than their Irish counterparts. Perhaps due to country size, perhaps due to the larger breadth of information (more global stories), or perhaps because the top UK publications were churning out a higher number of articles overall.
While the UK has a significantly larger following, we can see that Irish publications are important when it comes to nation specific news. Being less influenced by outside media makes these publications important to follow in order to see how these markets are adapting to their own unique audiences.
To read more content like this, check out our Facebook publisher rankings for September here.
