In the early hours following the Bondi Beach attack, all media outlets faced the same reflex: verify, show, count. Very quickly, a video’s performance no longer depended on its information, but also on the viewer’s sensitivity and, above all, on the platform broadcasting it.
Media Scan relies on social data collected via Tubular Labs, the global benchmark for video measurement. This Media Scan was conducted on 16 December 2025.
Our analysis focuses on the top 1,649 most-viewed media videos published in English between 14 and 16 December 2025. It reveals a subtle competition between eight distinct editorial angles (details at the end of the article) that resonate differently in terms of engagement depending on the platform. The alchemy of engagement is an area to be explored and investigated in order to identify working hypotheses to be tested. This is the raison d’être of Media Scan: to reinvent practices and formats using data.
Eight ways to tell the same story about the attack
The titles of the videos analysed fall into eight categories: alerts and ongoing updates (breaking, latest, developing, etc.), the number of victims and their condition, statements from the authorities and the progress of the investigation, visual evidence and eyewitness accounts, heroic moments such as when one of the terrorists was disarmed, etc.
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Discover Media Scan #01 : A president in prison; but what does Sarkozy’s fate tell us about social strategy and French Media
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This Media Scan is reserved for Upgrade Media clients.
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Tubular Labs
Tubular Labs is the leading platform for analysing video content on social media. Using a collection and classification engine that covers millions of videos per day on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and other channels, Tubular measures what the media publishes and, more importantly, how the public reacts.
Media Scan’s methodology
This episode of Media Scan analyses 1,649 videos published in English and exclusively by media outlets in the first 60 hours following the attack on Bondi Beach (Sydney). The content comes from four platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube) and has been consolidated into a single table in order to compare consistent indicators: views, engagements and engagement rates (ER).
The analysis does not seek to rate the media or judge journalistic quality. The aim is to understand how attention is generated in a crisis situation: which editorial promises dominate at the outset, which ones take over, and how each platform prioritises the same needs differently. To make the comparison usable, each video was classified according to its title in a taxonomy of eight angles.
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