Facebook Tweaks News Feed For Longer Videos

A new tweak from Facebook could have a big impact on the videos that appear in your social feed.

In a post Thursday, Facebook said it plans to adjust how videos in the News Feed are prioritized and ranked. Longer videos are now weighed proportionally and slightly more favorably in News Feed, which means that longer videos with regular viewers will see an uptick in distribution and popularity on the News Feed.

“One of the signals we look at is ‘percent completion’ — the percent of each video you watch — to help us understand which videos you enjoyed. 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’s statement said. “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.”

Previously, viewing time was measured identically among all videos. Now, poorly viewed short clips could see a downturn in viewers. The new video ranking settings will start rolling out within the next few weeks.

The update also illustrates the extent of Facebook’s push into video content. As Facebook notes, factors that weigh into how the News Feed ranks a video include completion percentage, whether the sound is enabled and even whether it’s played in fullscreen or not.

While videos are one more way Facebook can keep users active on the platform, the push for longer video content also doubles as a new revenue channel. In January, Facebook announced plans to launch ads on videos that run more than 90 seconds.