Papal intimacy, a screaming goat and candy-deprived children were among the most engaging online content of 2013, according to the Scoreboard of Content 2013, compiled by Ogilvy Public Relations and The Huffington Post UK.

The Scoreboard was based on a crowd-sourced appeal to more than 7.7 million influential consumers and creators. An expert panel of judges from the worlds of academia, media, marketing, content creation and social networks divided the crowd-sourced favourites into Top Fives across five genres: Sex, Humor, Fame, News, and Lifestyle.

The top scoring content in each category, and overall, is as follows:
• Miley Cyrus’ fusion of sex and shock at the MTV Video Music Awards, tops off a year of increasingly sex-fuelled music video content,and puts her at the pinnacle of the sex category, and overall
• For news, The Guardian’s ‘NSA Snowden Files’ scored highest, leading impactful news sharing online
• A home-production YouTuber, MrEpicMann, takes the top spot in humour with ‘How animals eat their food’
• Number one in the fame category is another home-generated piece of content, ‘Pope Selfie’, taken by @FabioMRagona
• In lifestyle, Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’achieved the top grade

Between them, the Scoreboard’s Top 25 generated more than 1,113,100,000 views and 5,787,600 shares across social media. Statistics, celebrity or monetary investment alone, however, did not guarantee impact in the mind of the public or top scores from the judges, who also focused on factors such as a hot title or headline, surprise and intimacy.

According to Ogilvy, the keys to creating and identifying content that lives, catches fire across media, across mediums, across lives and through the years are:
• A teasing, grabbing title or headline that demands universal engagement: People need to know why to look, why to care and why to share in the first millisecond content is encountered
• A promise of extremity: Extreme intimacy, exclusivity, sexiness, revelation, humour, shock or surprises are required to get noticed by the right people, and to get those people reacting, talking and sharing
• A promise of social currency: People need to feel that reacting to, with and sharing content reflects their own values and will benefit their own social standing and group