Facebook to measure time spend on pages in clickbait crackdown

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook is hoping to provide more relevant stories on the News Feed by measuring the amount of time users spend on clicked content, Digital Spy said.

The aim is to cut back on content that is not always what it seems - also known as clickbait - to lure users on to their sites.

"If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable," Facebook's Khalid El-Arini and Joyce Tang explained in a blog post. "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. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them."

Facebook will also factor in likes and comments to decide whether content is worth promoting. The move will undoubtedly affect publishers who use misleading headlines to attract people, the social networked added.