Facebook: Social Network Changes Its News Feed Algorithms To See What Videos You're Watching

Facebook has tweaked its News Feed algorithms to figure out what videos users want to see more of.

Facebook engineering manager Meihong Wang and software engineer Yue Zhuo announced that the social network would now begin looking into a user's implicit actions when watching a video to help determine just how much he or she wants to see certain videos and whether the user would like to see related videos on that subject in the future.

The social media site, which now takes in over 4 billion video views per day (up from 1 billion per day in September), began factoring in how long users stayed on specific posts and videos just a few weeks ago, according to Tech Crunch.

"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," Wang and Zhuo explained in a company blog post. "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."

Now, instead of having to export data to Excel, Page admins use a dashboard to track views of all videos they've shared, for how long users stay on a video and to determine top videos by performance so the social media site can gauge what to share more of.

Facebook has also been adjusting the way it prioritizes other types of posts based on the amount of time users spend on particular stories; later, this will determine what will show up in certain users' newsfeeds, according to the Monitor Daily.

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