Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire lost the top spot among publishers on Facebook this March, a position it held since 2020.
NewsWhip’s monthly roundup of the top engaging publisher on Facebook came out on Wednesday and announced a “big shakeup” in its rankings.
The Daily Wire, co-founded in 2015 by Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, lost the top spot to the Daily Mail in March.
The Mail’s content received 32.67 million engagements in the month compared to The Wire’s 25.86 million engagements, a significant margin of victory.
A BIG shakeup in the @NewsWhip rankings this month as @MailOnline supplants @realDailyWire at the top of the rankings for the first time since 2020.
Read more here: https://t.co/sW09j2ZWbz pic.twitter.com/j9lM2Awq3o
— Benedict Nicholson (@BenNicholsonNW) April 6, 2022
NewsWhip’s Benedict Nicholson explained the shakeup: “This was brought about by both a slight rise in engagement for The Daily Mail and a slight fall in engagement for the Daily Wire compared to February.”
The Daily Wire saw a drop in engagement despite launching its new Daily Wire for Kids, which aims to compete with Disney.
The Daily Wire’s success on Facebook has been unparalleled in media and is one of the reasons the company announced it brought in over $100,000,000 in revenue in 2021.
NPR wrote about The Wire’s success in July 2021, noting the “site produces little original reporting but instead mostly repackages journalism from traditional news organizations with a conservative slant…The Daily Wire has turned anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.”
In February The Mail raked in nearly 30 million engagements, compared to more than 34.5 million engagements for The Wire.
Nicholson breaks down the Mail’s success, noting that its top-five engaging stories for the month were all related to Ukraine:
For The Daily Mail, the content that was most engaged was much more uniform than it often is, with all of the top five stories touching on the invasion of Ukraine in some way or another. These included donations made by Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher (265k), girls crying as their father went off to fight (259k), a Ukrainian refugee being greeted by their new classmates (256k), a Russian general being killed by a sniper (237k), and a girl managing to successfully flee the invasion (212k).
The Wire, Nicholson points out, had no consistent theme in its top-five posts, although most were engaging in right-leaning culture war issues:
The Daily Wire had no such thematic unity, with all five of its top articles being about different topics. These included a viral Candace Owens response (386k), its coverage of Emma Weyent and Lia Thomas (379k), Mila Kunis’s donations to Ukraine (323k), Kid Rock’s comments on ‘cancel culture’ (311k), and a court case over a dad going maskless at a sports game (279k).
The U.K.’s Mirror and BBC also landed in the top five most engaging publishers for the month on Facebook, while Nigeria’s Legit landed in fifth.
CNN scored sixth place, followed by NBC News, Business Insider, Breitbart, and the Philippines’ ABS-CBN.
NewsWhip ranks the publishers based on “our API and NewsWhip Spike,” which looks at all “English-language content from publishers, ranked by Facebook likes, shares, and comments to their web content, ranked by domain.”
