There is no doubt that news these days does literally travel at almost the speed of light. What was once breaking news can be fish and chip wrap within minutes of hitting the web. Some news sites are better than others at getting out ahead of that ever shortening curve and this is what a startup by the name of News Whip wanted to find out – who is the best news site at being viral.
The Irish startup says it tracks about 60,000 freshly published news stories each and every day from approximately 5,000 different sources; which it used in the form of its November data to find out which sources were producing the most viral content.
To figure out what qualifies as being viral News Whip uses the per hour number of tweets on Twitter or Facebook shares with that magical number being 150 for each service.
Using this number as the qualifier News Whip came up with this list of the top producers of viral news content. Here is the top 10 of those sites:
1. Huffington Post
2. BBC
3. Guardian
4. Dailymail
5. Mashable
6. ABCNews
7. Techcrunch
8. Foxnews
9. ESPN
10. Engadget
Now News Whip did have two qualifiers when it came to creating the list. One, they don’t go behind paywalls to monitor paid sites which explains the lack of any appearances from sites like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
The second is that News Whip looks at the aggregated data – “ this is who’s most successful in quantity, not quality “.
I guess that explains exactly why “some” news sites made the list over others.
via The Next Web (who placed 24th on the list – congrats)
