News Feed FYI: Taking into Account More Actions on Videos

June 29, 2015

By: Meihong Wang, Engineering Manager, and Yue Zhuo, Software Engineer

The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. As part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we asked people to rate their experience and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook. One of the most significant findings from this work is that there are many times people don’t want to like, comment on, or share a post, but this does not mean it wasn’t meaningful to them. We recently shared that we now take into account the amount of time people spend on a particular story relative to other content in their News Feed.

We have learned that certain actions people take on a video, such as choosing to turn on sound or making the video full screen, are good signs they wanted to see that video, even if they didn’t want to like it. Today, we want to share an update to News Feed ranking that takes into account these actions to help people see more of the videos they care about and fewer of the videos they don’t.

Taking Actions on Videos

We have previously made updates to News Feed that take into account whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it, so people who tend to watch videos in News Feed will see more videos higher up in their News Feed, and people who watch fewer videos will see videos further down. With this update, we want to show people more of the types of videos they want to see, and fewer of the videos they don’t.

Many people have told us that they enjoy watching videos in News Feed but don’t always feel inclined to like, comment or share them. For example, you may have found a video from a nonprofit you follow on Facebook to be really informative and you’re glad you saw it but it’s not something you felt inclined to like, comment on or share more broadly.

We are now taking into account more interactions with videos that we have learned indicate whether someone found that video interesting, such as choosing to turn on sound, making the video full screen, and enabling high definition. So if you turn the volume up or make the video full screen, we have updated News Feed to infer you liked the video and will show you similar videos higher up in your News Feed. We have found that this helps us show people more videos that they are interested in.

We’ve just started rolling this out and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. We do not expect most Pages to see significant changes in distribution as a result of this update.