They want to do this so that the News Feed would look better, and the users will benefit from an improved experience.
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Facebook’s goal is to gauge which types of articles are interesting to a specific user so that it can display relevant content more prominently in its stream of updates.
Facebook will be able to better understand which articles might be interesting to users with this change, which means that users will then be more likely to see stories in their News Feed that they actually want to read. These so-called “clickbait” articles are in the Facebook crosshairs, and the social network is introducing new features to keep them out of your News Feed. It’s now added another factor to News Feed ranking which predicts how long users will spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Articles after they’ve clicked through from News Feed. “We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold”, the pair said, “so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially”. Facebook’s Moshe Blank and Jie Xu wrote in a blog post.
Facebook points out that it does not matter if an article is an Instant Article viewed on Facebook, or one viewed in a mobile browser, the timing will be monitored and treated in the same way. The social network is adjusting the way it ranks articles, taking into account how often you and others spend reading/viewing them.
You might not realise it but Facebook has swarms of users running tests all the time – marking what they like and what they don’t like in the News Feed. Getting the feed from the same publisher back to back is repetitive.
In the same post, Facebook announced that it will also make an update to its ranking system to reduce how often people see several posts in a row from the same page in response to feedback from users. Publishers who wish to post Native Ads must have pages that have been approved by Facebook, and will be required to specify (“tag”) the brand that paid for the post.
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The rollout of the new News Feed started recently, and will continue over the next few weeks; it will affect both your personal Facebook feed and that of any pages you have on the platform.
