Video is important to Facebook - and it wants you to watch as much of it as possible .
The massive social network announced this week it is changing up how videos appear on the news feed .
As well as measuring the amount of interactions (likes, comments, sound on/off) a video gets - or whether it's live or not - Facebook will be measuring 'percent completion'. Which means that videos that are watched through to the end will be deemed more relevant.
Facebook reckons that the longer you spend watching a video before scrolling on, the more interested other people will also be to watch it.
"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," Abhishek Bapna a product manager and Seyoung Park, a research scientist, explained in a Facebook blog post .
"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."
The pair didn't specify exactly when the new change will come in, only that it will be rolled out "in the coming weeks".
Last year, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed that users watch 100 million hours of video a day on the social network.
But the reason it's pushing for longer videos may have something to do with the rumours that it plans to start letting adverts into them.
According to a report in Recode , Facebook will allow publishers to insert ads into their video clips after people have watched them for at least 20 seconds.
Publishers will receive 55% of the revenue from these ads - the same split offered by YouTube - industry sources told the tech site.
The move marks a step change for Facebook, which until now has resisted allowing "pre-roll" ads that play before a video starts.
0 comments: