Facebook Changes News Feed Algorithm To Favor ‘Time Spent Viewing’ Articles, More Publisher Variety

Facebook considers a litany of factors — such as liking, clicking, commenting, and sharing — in order to determine the kind of content it will feature in users’ News Feeds. Now, the company has added another factor to the mix to make feeds better suited to users’ tastes: viewing time on article links.

Starting now and rolling out in coming weeks, Facebook will compute how much time users spend reading articles that take them beyond the bounds of their News Feeds to help determine whether they will show them more of the same, write software engineer Moshe Blank and research scientist Jie Xu in a company blog post.

“We will now predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed,” according to the post. In order to not favor articles that simply happen to be longer, Facebook said, it will “be looking at the time spent within a threshold.”

Another change coming to News Feed soon is an algorithm that will pointedly show users articles from a variety of publishers. “We’ll also be making an update to reduce how often people see several posts in a row from the same source in their News Feed,” write Blank and Xu. “It can be repetitive if too many articles from the same source are back to back.”

Facebook’s algorithm tweaks can have sweeping effects on the media landscape. In March, the company made it so its roughly 1.6 billion users would see a lot more live streaming video. It flipped a similar switch for standard videos in 2014.