Anna Vital of Funders and Founders created a most beautiful info graphic to visualize what the most read stories of the Internet.  This is a static picture of her amazing interactive document – blinking eye and all.

For each top English-language media website in the world, we found the most shared articles using Ahrefs Content Explorer (You can explore these yourself by clicking on the names of publications under the bubbles. The index is alive and changes every day).

Here’s the criteria:

1. Have a large number of both likes and tweets
2. Be an idea, not an event or person (can explain it in 1 tweet)
3. Have a lot of comments (on the publisher’s site). Sticky ideas produce a lot of strong reactions, as judged by lengthy comments and the number of comments.
4. Not be a video or a picture gallery (without text). If we factored in photos sets, cat memes, etc., they would win any day, but they don’t articulate and an idea.