Facebook’s attempt to minimize clickbait accelerates as they announce two new updates following the three earlier this year. Facebook has modified its algorithms to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most relevant and weed out stories that are deemed spam.
“Click-baiting” is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed, as written in a recent blog post by Facebook.
Over time, as more and more formats of media become available, the meaning broadened. It can now refer to anything from a story with a catchy headline to content on certain topics that have become popular online such as the Ebola outbreak or the ice bucket challenge.
Facebook has employed a ‘time spent on page’ metric. Many companies are increasingly using this metric as a desired digital media measurement. Companies such as Upworthy and The Financial Times have incorporated this as a measure of engagement in ads.
“If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted,” said Facebook employees in the blog post.
This new update can have a significant impact on digital media companies as it will change the way people see advertisements. The halt of clickbait and false advertising would potentially improve behaviour towards advertisement and increase positive responses.
“Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends,” the Facebook team wrote. “If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.”
The older update when only so far as it concentrated on returning users from a spam page back to their feed, however, the latest update identifies, categorizes and appropriately ranks them lower on one’s feed. The anti-clickbait system gets smarter over time. If a publication realizes the error and changes their clickbait content, for example, their posts will stop being ranked as low.
Hopefully, this will encourage an innovative but fair way to attract views and will act as a catalyst for change.
