Facebook is going to push longer videos into your News Feed
Facebook wants people watching longer videos, and now it's going to start prioritizing them in the News Feed.
Facebook is specifically changing how it weighs "percent completion," or the percent of a video you finish watching, according to a company blog post on Thursday. This means that "longer videos that people spend time watching may see a slight increase in distribution on Facebook."
This change to the News Feed's algorithms is the latest in a series of tweaks Facebook has recently made, others of which favored live videos and posts shared by friends rather than publishers. It also comes as Facebook is considering bankrolling its own original longform shows for its mobile app's video tab.
"If you watch most or all of a video, that tells us that you found the video to be compelling - and we know that completing a longer video is a bigger commitment than completing a shorter one," Facebook said on Thursday. "As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we've realized that we should therefore weight percent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos."