They say the future of media is video. With that in mind, Facebook has been really pushing their platform as an alternative to YouTube, Vimeo and other embedded players. They’ve been successful, mostly due to the fact that their videos often autoplay (by default) and can be viewed on the facebook app or News Feed without needing to be redirected to an external site.

Previously, the social media giant measured a small set of metrics to determine which videos were the most relevant to its users. They would look at how long a video is watched, whether sound was turned on and if full screen was engaged.

Now though, they’ve started looking at “percent completion”, or how much of a video is watched. If most or all of the video is watched, then it signals them that the content is compelling. The longer a video is, the more compelling it has to be for people to watch a higher percentage of it, while shorter ones take just a few seconds. As such, it makes more sense that longer videos with a higher percent completion should be taken more seriously and given an advantage.

Will this mean that more content creators will move towards longer videos? Not necessarily. Long videos with poor percent completion averages will still be rated poorly. All this does is level the playing field for those who make good, engaging content that just can’t be compressed into a few seconds.