Facebook wants you to watch longer videos, so it’s going to show you longer videos – Recode (Jan 26, 2017)
“Facebook wants to sell mid-roll video ads, so it’s going to show you more longer videos” would be an even more direct reading of this situation. Facebook recently began introducing mid-roll video ads, but of course those don’t do any good if the videos people watch are too short to hit the point where an ad would be shown. And Facebook has arguably trained its audience and content providers to prefer short videos, because those tend to grab attention better and lend themselves better to the soundless auto-play scenario that dominates video viewing on Facebook now. In order, then, to feed users more video ads, Facebook needs first to feed users longer videos, and it’s tweaked its algorithms to show more longer videos than before. On the surface, this is about fairness – percentage completion rates are always going to be lower for longer videos for short ones, and so some weighting is required to measure performance fairly. But this is really a fairly transparent way to provide yet more slots for Facebook ads, as with this week’s testing of banner ads in Messenger. As with that announcement, Facebook is here going to begin bumping up against the natural limits of how many ads its users will tolerate, and will have to be very careful.
via Recode (official blog post here)
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