Facebook has tweaked its News Feed algorithm so it can start showing users videos they are interested in watching.
In a blog post, Facebook engineering manager Meihong Wang and software engineer Yue Zhuo announced that the social network will now take into account a user's implicit actions when watching a video to determine how much he wants to see that video and whether he wants to see similar and related videos in the future.
Facebook previously relied on explicit actions, such as liking, posting a comment or sharing a video to determine a user's level of interest in seeing other videos with similar content. Now, the social network will start to look at other factors as well.
"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," said Wang and Zhuo.
The update rolls out to all users starting on Tuesday. From then on, whenever a user unmutes a video, opens it in HD or expands it to full screen, Facebook will think the user wants to watch other videos of that sort and will place similar videos on top of their News Feed in the future.
Of course, this is not an entirely accurate way of predicting what users like to see. For instance, a user might click on a video of animal brutality because of its shocking headline, but that doesn't mean he wants to see other videos of that kind in the future.
Still, Facebook has been exerting all efforts to go big on video, and it has plenty of other measures to determine what users want to see. Most recently, Facebook announced that it was taking into account how much time users spend watching a certain video and if they viewed the video at all or scrolled past it. The more users view videos on their News Feed, the more videos will be available, and vice versa.
The social network is also rolling out video improvements for Pages, specifically better video analytics that allow admins to track the performance of their videos straight from Facebook itself, without having to export the data into an Excel spreadsheet. The new analytics will also allow admins to monitor individual videos and Page-level views across a certain period of time.
Facebook has been all about videos for the past several months, and we can see its efforts are proving to be productive as it quickly closes the gap between it and YouTube. In September, Facebook had 1 billion video views per day, a figure that quickly grew to 4 billion in April. If all those views were compressed into a single moment, it would be equivalent to more than half the world population watching Facebook videos simultaneously.
Photo: Kristina Alexanderson | Flickr
