Facebook has started rolling more changes to its News Feed. It will now take into account how long a person spends looking at an article.
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.
Facebook says this change will, it hopes, result in more stories popping up in News Feed that users will actually want to read. In addition, the company is also taking steps to cut down on the number of posts users see in the feed from the same source. These changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks, and Facebook says most users won't see any major changes to their Pages.
