Viral, Sports, and Media Dominated December’s Chart: Top Facebook Publishers December 2018

By Bree Brouwer · January 21, 2019

Viral, Sports, and Media Dominated December’s Chart: Top Facebook Publishers December 2018

In December 2018, the top Facebook publishers in the leading ten spots generated nearly 13.3 billion total views on that platform alone. And now that we have the insights on who these top ten were, as well as which brands and publishers landed in the next 90 spots, we’re going to take a look at how they all performed. For starters, let’s review some of the main data points from across the top 100 publishers last month:

  • Six publishers claimed at least 1 billion views each (the most-watched publisher hit more than 3 billion alone).
  • The highest average 30-day engagement rate (ER30) of the top ten publishers was 1.1x, while the highest ER30 of the top 100 publishers was shared by two of them at 2.6x!
  • The best 30-day average (V30) from the top ten was an impressive 4.5 million, and the highest V30 of all 100 publishers hit 22.1 million.
  • Out of all 100 publishers, 7 of them increased rankings by at least 100 positions each, with the biggest position change clocking in at a massive 1695 spots.

Top Facebook Publishers December 2018

Facebook Video Publishers December 2018
Top 10 Most-Watched Facebook Publishers December 2018 (data via Tubular) – rankings include only those creators and brands which publish primarily original content

For the last month of 2018, we didn’t see many changes across the top ten publishers (except for one key brand which we’ll discuss more below). However, what did change the most were many of the publishers in spots 20-100. Back on November’s leaderboard, we saw a massive amount of publishers increase their ranks on the chart, but December saw a more select group of names rise above the crowd. These were some of the most stand-out trends from last month’s top Facebook publishers:

New Viral, Sports Publishers Soar onto December’s Leaderboard

If you know anything about Facebook or our monthly leaderboards, you know for a fact that viral entertainment will always have a giant community and welcome home on Facebook. Brave Bison’s Viral TRND, for example, continues to remain at #1, while fellow viral publishers UNILAD, LADbible, and VT refuse to let other publishers knock them out of the top five spots. However, sometimes the Facebook community just wants more viral content, and other publishers who rise up to meet those needs see immediate results.

This was the case for Mommy Works A Lot, a Facebook page that seemingly came out of nowhere in November to generate 27.8 million views. But December’s view count of 225 million shattered that number, and also helped the publisher jump an astounding 1695 positions to become last month’s publisher with the biggest rank increase! So what does Mommy Works A Lot distribute in terms of viral content specifically? As the name indicates, a lot of the page’s content has to do with comedic videos related to working moms, children, household chores, pets, and family life. This clip was its biggest hit in December, gaining almost 15 million views in that month alone and topping off at 23.5 million views to date:

Posted by Mommy Works A Lot on Friday, 14 December 2018

Another publisher’s rise to fame in December stemmed not from the fact that it uploads general viral content, but because it centers around the most popular sport in the entire world: football (aka soccer to U.S. fans). ProFutbolista was another high-riser last month, jumping 1125 spots to land at #30 with a solid 386 million total views. The Spanish-language publisher’s most popular video from December covered exciting highlights from various games and drew in 475K views in just over a week, with 4.3 million views to date. Clearly, football aficionados around the world will never tire of watching short snippets of their favorite players and teams performing game-winning moves and goals.

Media and News Brands Continue Successful Reign on Facebook

Over the last few months, the Daily Mail has proven it can take some of its sub-properties and turn them into Facebook video giants; December was no different for the media publisher. The Daily Mail Australia property, for example, remains incredibly popular with viewers around the world as it increased 38 positions in December to land at #11 globally on Facebook. Since August 2018, the media publisher hasn’t backtracked a single position yet! It’s videos like this one — its most-watched from last month at a whopping 76.9 million views thanks to the clip’s positive nature — that help keep Daily Mail Australia at the top of viewers’ minds month after month:

Kindness makes the world go round! ❤️????

Kindness makes the world go round! ❤️????

Posted by Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday, 4 December 2018

Speaking of the success of media brands as top Facebook publishers, December saw even more media and news publishers perform well at the end of 2018. The UK’s E4 channel was one of them. We hinted at this brand above when we talked about the top ten publishers of December, and that’s because E4 bumped up four spots to land at #10 last month thanks to almost 750 million total views! Other media brands also increased their viewership in December, including CBS News (up 23 spots with about 334 million views), AOL (up 285 spots with almost 324 million views), and newcomer Brut (up 35 spots with 244 million views). If news and media publishers hope to reach a larger audience in 2019, there’s no better place to consider than Facebook!

Tubular Video Ratings

You’ll notice some exclusive data in this month’s chart as we include Tubular Video Ratings, a unique group of online video metrics that set the standard for measurement of views and engagements across videos and publishers. They include a simplified first 30-day engagement rating (ER30) and first 30-day views (V30).

Get the Full List of Top 25 Video Publishers on Facebook & Other Video Platforms

Tune in Every Month for the Most Up-to-Date Stats! Each month Tubular Insights will publish the most up-to-date leaderboard charts, so stay tuned! In the meantime, sign up for a free Tubular account and get access to the complete list of the top 25 video creators across YouTube, Facebook, and cross-platform. Get access today just by clicking this link.

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