Facebook has made changes to the way in which its news feed surfaces videos, placing more emphasis on longer content.
The change will roll out gradually over the coming weeks and will be limited to organic videos, rather than video ad distribution.
The social media giant measures the ‘video relevance’ to each individual user by the length of time spent watching each piece of content. With this in mind, the algorithm will now consider completing a longer video a ‘bigger commitment’ than completing a shorter one, giving it a more reliable insight into user preferences.
In a blog post, Facebook product manager Abhishek Bapna, and research scientist Seyoung Park, said, “As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we’ve realised that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalising longer videos.
“While we expect that most pages will not see significant changes in distribution as a result of this update, longer videos that people spend time watching may see a slight increase in distribution on Facebook — so people who find longer videos engaging may be able to discover more of them in news feed. As a side effect, some shorter videos may see a slight dip in news feed distribution.”
