Year in Review: Kaleida’s News Performance Report
Today Kaleida released its first annual news performance report. The report includes content rankings, publisher scorecards, and analysis of news performance from across 2017. Download the full report PDF (11MB).
In a new finding about Facebook’s algorithm Kaleida’s report includes analysis of significant changes to the way content performance was measured this year. Facebook made a change to its algorithm in June (see “Facebook engagement data gets more accurate — and bigger!”) which increased the top line number of engagements for news articles in the market, but most articles still earned fewer engagements from month to month on average.
The median engagements for news has declined consistently since May. It dropped from 36 in May to only 23 by the end of November. The overall median for 2017 was 33.
CTO Graham Tackley said, “Half of all news published gets hardly any attention on Facebook. And the numbers are declining. Even the really big news publishers are seeing their engagement numbers going down.”
In addition to the Facebook engagement analysis, Kaleida’s rankings include the top 10 news articles by Facebook engagements (see below), news publishers’ coverage of Donald Trump, and the leading subjects in categories such as sports, books and cities around the world.
For example, the report includes a new league table that ranks the members British royal family by coverage efficiency. While coverage efficiency of Prince Harry was strong in 2017, a story about Queen Elizabeth earned the most engagements among stories about the royal family.
Top 10 News Articles of 2017 by Facebook engagements
- 2,372,600 Facebook engagements: “Trapped Mexican bakers make ‘pan dulce’ bread for hundreds of Harvey victims” by The Independent (data)
- 1,680,741 engagements: “Top CBS lawyer: No sympathy for Vegas vics, ‘probably Republicans’” by Fox News (data)
- 1,143,483 engagements: “Harvey and Irma, Married 75 Years, Marvel at the Storms Bearing Their Names” by the New York Times (data)
- 1,105,364 engagements: “Trump Removes Anthony Scaramucci From Communications Director Role” by the New York Times (data)
- 1,053,691 engagements: “Tina Fey Absolutely Destroys Nazis, Trump & Paul Ryan While Eating A Sheet Cake” by HuffPost (data)
- 1,034,011 engagements: “Sir Bruce Forsyth: TV legend dies aged 89” by BBC News (data)
- 963,961 engagements: “Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington commits suicide” by Daily Mail (data)
- 904,129 engagements: “Vice President Mike Pence leaves Colts-49ers game after players reportedly kneel” by Fox News (data)
- 852,330 engagements: “Floods in India, Bangladesh and Nepal kill 1,200 and leave millions homeless” by The Independent (data)
- 824,761 engagements: “President Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List” by the New York Times (data)
Download the full End of Year 2017 report
ABOUT KALEIDA
Kaleida is a data services and media research company. The company provides data, tools and analysis about the attention economy to companies who do business in the media ecosystem.
News publishers can learn about platform referral traffic and get performance benchmarks to compare against the market by joining Kaleida’s news referral research project: https://survey.kaleida.com/
