Facebook finally following Google’s lead, years later, ranking sites based on time spent on sites

Facebook has announced a change to its News Feed that is aimed at minimizing “click-bait,” or stories that attract users to click on a story but may not offer much substance.

The social network revealed the change in a blog post on Monday, citing continued pressure from users to present better content in the News Feed.

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To do that, Facebook is employing a metric becoming increasingly popular across the Internet: time spent on page.

“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,” Facebook employees Khalid El-Arini and Joyce Tang wrote in the blog post.

The change could have a major impact on digital media companies. Facebook has become one of the most influential publishing platforms, driving major traffic to sites that have a strong following on the site and are able to get users to share posts with friends.

Facebook Takes the Clickbait, Will Rank Sites on Time Spent Instead.