Facebook to Alter News Feed to Show More Articles You Want to Read

Facebook announced yesterday it plans to “improve” your News Feed by taking into consideration ‘Time Spent Viewing’ into its algorithm to determine better articles to show up that you may want to read.

Facebook news feed edgerank algorithm

Image via TechCrunch

Based on feedback from users via their “Feedback Quality Program”, which asks random users to rate their daily experience, the company has determined the time people spend within an article or news story–within the mobile browser–is an important indicator of interest:

We are adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that 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. This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it. We will not be counting loading time towards this — we will be taking into account time spent reading and watching once the content has fully loaded. We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially.

Another change will diversify Page posts, which means you’ll start seeing a range of articles from various publishers, specifically cut down on several posts in a row from the same website or company.

Facebook says this News Feed change will take place over the “coming weeks”, and the changes won’t be significant for Pages, but some may see a small increase or decrease in referral traffic (click here to ‘Like’ us on Facebook!).

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