Facebook updates algorithm to give you better videos

The company will now infer what you want to see based on more than just likes, comment and shares

Who could have guessed that video, of all things, would become so important to Facebook? I remember a time when I, and probably most people, thought that video would kill the network. Now it is thriving, with the company serving four billion video views every single day, up from just one billion back in September.

With numbers like its no wonder it is becoming increasingly important to the company. So, Facebook revealed a new alogrithm change on Monday, one that will be able to allow the company to get the best videos in front of its users at all times, even if that user takes no actions such as liking, sharing or commenting.

"The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. As part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we asked people to rate their experience and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook," the company wrote in a blog post.

"One of the most significant findings from this work is that there are many times people don’t want to like, comment on, or share a post, but this does not mean it wasn’t meaningful to them."

That means that all a users has to do is turn the sound on, make the video full screen, and Facebook will now take those actions into account as a sign that you want to see more of that kind of video. Basically, it will infer that that's what you like to watch.

The end result of that means more of the videos you want to see (granted that you didn't unmute or hit the fullscreen button by accident ) at the top of the News Feed, because that's obviously going to be where more videos get watched.

"With this update, we want to show people more of the types of videos they want to see, and fewer of the videos they don’t," the company said. 

This is just the latest action taken by Facebook to upgrade the video watching experience on News Feed.

The company gave a boost to its video ad unit in July of 2014, with the purchase of online video distribution and ad-platform LiveRail.

LiveRail helps companies, including Major League Baseball, ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion, to serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps. It also provides increased targeting capabilities. The company delivers over 7 billion video ads each month.

In January Facebook bought video infrastructure company Quickfire, the developer of technology that reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to view video online without degrading video quality.

(Image source: digiday.com)