Election Season Drives Fox News Into Top 2 Of Facebook Publishers In July [Report]

With election season ramping up, conservative news sites are moving up NewsWhip’s monthly list of the top Facebook publishers. None is benefitting from the spotlight on the Republican presidential race more than Fox News and its regional news sites, which pushed past Buzzfeed to become the No. 2 publisher in July based on overall engagement. The Huffington Post held onto its No. 1 spot, but by less than two million interactions.

NewsWhip says it’s the first time that anyone other than HuffPo and Buzzfeed has occupied the top two.

The site’s rankings are based on the overall count of likes, shares and comments on each website’s Facebook posts during a given month. As you can see below, quantity also plays a role in Fox News ascendance — it and its local affiliate sites (which are included in NewsWhip’s count) — published nearly three times as many articles as Huffington Post and about 10 times more than Buzzfeed.

Three other conservative political sites also made July’s list of top Facebook publishers: Conservative Tribune, Breitbart and Western Journalism Center. Fox News was third in June, and Conservative Tribune was 24th; neither Breitbart nor Western Journalism Center was in the top 25 last month.

Sports publishers also did well in July, with ESPN, Goal.com and Bleacher Report all making NewsWhip’s top ten.

The numbers are sourced from Spike, NewsWhip’s content discovery platform that tracks content engagement on the social Web.

(Fox News truck photo by Vincent Desjardins, used via Creative Commons license.)