Social networks’ news feeds have one main goal – to deliver relevant stories and highlights to the users, so they won’t miss anything important and relevant to them. Perhaps the most important part of the news feed are videos, and Facebook state that twice as many people now watch videos on Facebook than they did six months ago.
Facebook is now launching an improvement to the way they rank videos people upload. They’re trying to better understand what videos people are interested in watching, so that relevant videos will appear in the news feed.
Up until now, Facebook considered factors such as likes, comments and shares when they measured the relevancy of videos uploaded directly to Facebook. The new improvement considers whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it.
This way, the news feed will be more personalized based on user’s preferences. People who watch many videos in their news feed would see more videos near the top of their feed. Conversely, those who skip over videos consistently are likely to see fewer videos.
It’s important to note that this improvement only applies to videos uploaded to Facebook directly by users. For links to other sites, Facebook already uses some similar metrics to rank those stories.