Facebook is giving longer videos a bump in your News Feed

Remember the days when we talked about how Facebook and Snapchat are competing for these things called views?

Yes, we cared about the overall number of three-seconds versus one-millisecond of time people spent on the apps.

Forget about those meager numbers.

Facebook wants your eyes to be glued for much longer than three seconds.

Why? Television has more dollars.

On Thursday, Facebook announced longer videos watched through will be given a higher priority in the ranking of the News Feed.

Hidden within a jargon-filled, 411-word News Feed FYI (a blog dedicated to publishers and other Facebook Page owners), Facebook shared a change to the algorithm that addresses completion rate: "As we continue to understand how our community consumes video, we've realised that we should therefore weight per cent completion more heavily the longer a video is, to avoid penalizing longer videos."

So it's not just about those casual moments; those six-second (RIP Vine) puppy videos.

It's about you essentially experiencing television when you're on News Feed. That's not unlike YouTube, which categorizes video based on watch time.

Curiously, the announcement comes just hours before Alphabet, Google's parent company and the owner of YouTube, announces its fourth quarter and full year of 2016 earnings.

The complexities of Facebook's algorithm are still a mystery.

The post emphasised the fact that before completion rate was integrated into the quality filter, it did not significantly address, at least to Facebook's eyes, differences in video lengths.

It's not like you'll stop seeing short videos.

Facebook, which has somewhat embraced a role as a media company as of late, advised that longer video doesn't necessarily mean better.

Read the full article here.

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