Facebook will pay, promote longer videos in News Feed

In a bid to improve the content on its platform, Facebook will now credit publishers if their video is watched for a minimum of three seconds and take down those which have minimum "views".

The social media giant would now use a new algorithm that would determine the value of a video and it would rank that clip accordingly in a user's News Feed.

"Today, we're announcing a change to the way we rank videos in News Feed to adjust the value we give to how much of a video is watched," Facebook said in a blog post on Saturday.

"One of the signals we look at is 'per cent completion' -- the per cent of each video you watch -- to help us understand which videos you enjoyed. If you watch most or all of a video, this tells us that you found the video to be compelling," the post added.

This would tell Facebook how the communities consume videos, eventually empowering the company to avoid penalising longer videos.

The micro-blogging site said it "expects that most Pages will not see significant changes in distribution as a result of this update, longer videos that people spend time watching may see a slight increase in distribution on Facebook".

This may also trigger a dip for shorter videos in News Feed distribution.