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NOBODY reading your Facebook post? TOUGH LUCK, sez Zuck

Free content ad network only cares about MEELLIONS of EYEBALLS

Facebook has fiddled with its News Feed algorithm to scan the amount of time someone spends reading a given post on the site and app.

It means that "stories" that are shunned on the free content ad network will be pushed further down Facebook's News Feed page.

Unsurprisingly, the Mark Zuckerberg-run company characterised the latest change to Facebook as a way of showing "the content that matters to you."

In reality, though, this really translates to the content that matters to Facebook's real customers: admen.

This new so-called ranking signal will creepily take into account the amount of time users (sorry, people) spend "viewing a story" within the News Feed.

Facebook said it was able to determine whether someone was, say, connecting to its service over a crappy network link:

When talking to people about the way they use their News Feed, we’ve found that it’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story to understand if that piece of content resonated with you.

Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow internet connection.

We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them.

Other ranking signals that are closely tracked by Facebook include "likes" and "comments", which in turn allow for better ad targeting of its users (sorry, people). ®

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