Press Gazette has ranked the biggest UK and US news publishers on Instagram with four achieving follower-counts above ten million.
We looked at the news publishers from our top 50 UK and US website rankings to compile our new research.
Two publishers – BBC News (27.8 million) and CNN (20 million) – are above the 20 million mark. When Press Gazette last ranked publisher Instagram accounts (in June 2023) BBC News had 7.4m followers on the platform and CNN 4.2m.
The top two on Instagram are followed by the New York Times (18.2 million) and People (13.6 million).
In comparison, only one news publisher (Daily Mail) from the two top 50 lists has topped ten million on Tiktok, the newer platform.
Ladbible does not feature in the latest ranking because it has it has fallen out of the list of the top 50 news websites in the UK. It currently has 14.1 million followers to its biggest Instagram account. Cosmopolitan, The Daily Wire, The Verge, NME, Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit similarly have fallen out of our top 50s so do not eapp
Excluding the impact of Ladbible’s removal, the top seven remain the same – but The Guardian (5.8 million followers) in eighth place has overtaken Buzzfeed and Unilad (both 5.7 million).
The fastest-growing Instagram account over a two-year period was the New York Post, increasing by 74.7% since 2022 to 1.2 million.
It was followed by Healthline Media (up 60% since 2022 to 1.3 million) and UK tabloid the Mirror (up 57% to 441,000).
Four news publishers on our list saw their Instagram followings decline since June 2023: Buzzfeed (down 7%), sister publication Huffpost (3% to 3.2 million), Unilad (down 2%) and The Daily Beast (down 2% to 452,000).
Since June 2023 only, the Mirror was the fastest-growing (up 45%) followed by ITV News (up 34% to 512,000) and the New York Post (up 32%).
But the follower count for BBC News increased the most in absolute terms (2.1 million) since last year - almost double the next largest growth seen by Fox News (up 1.2 million to 9.4 million).
Four added at least one million followers to their counts - also including the New York Times and People.
The percentage of people saying they use Instagram for news has risen from 2% in 2014 to 15% this year in 12 key markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Ireland.
It remains behind Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp in importance but has overtaken Twitter/X and is still ahead of Tiktok and Snapchat.
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