Certain publishers will be impacted more than others when Facebook’s News Feed changes come into effect. Buzzfeed saw a 5.95 percent decrease in Facebook visits from the prior quarter, and SimilarWeb has noted that if Facebook continues to tweak its algorithm, publishers can expect to see further declines.
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We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles.
Two years ago, the social network said it was cracking down on clickbait, something it describes as “headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer”. Facebook’s system identifies these phrases much in the same way as email spam filters.
Facebook constantly changes its computer algorithm that determines what people see in the news feed, making small tweaks on a almost daily basis and bigger ones about once a month to weed out the junk and give priority to “authentic” content. Facebook. he says, is targeting “spam-like content farms” that will see a significant reduction in “reach and referral traffic”. “Our system identifies posts that are clickbait, and which web domains and Pages these posts come from”. So Thursday’s announcement will be parsed by publishers for details about what Facebook thinks it is. This time, Facebook reviewed tens of thousands of headlines to determine if the headline withheld key information or if it exaggerated the article.
Entire networks of web sites exist to win traffic through these types of headlines.
Two years ago, Facebook made an initial effort to eliminate the News Feed’s surplus of “clickbait” – a hard to define but nearly universally despised form of online content that leaves readers feel tricked, cheated, or otherwise dissatisfied. If a user clicked on a link but navigated back to Facebook quickly, then the quality of that post was likely lower than those with more time spent, the thinking went.
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Why does the company care if you’re satisfied by the links you click? Facebook is aiming to deliver what users want which is content that is “real and genuine”, he says.
