How long has it been since Facebook changed its news feed algorithm?
We decided to keep track of how long it's been since Facebook announced a change to its news feed algorithm.
Tim Peterson on August 11, 2016 at 2:49 pm | Reading time: 2 minutes
Facebook tweaks its news feed algorithm pretty often. How often? In a six-week span between late June 2016 and mid-August 2016, Facebook announced three different algorithm changes. So we decided to start keeping track of how long it’s been since the last one. First, the counter:
Want to know more about the last change and some of the previous ones? Here’s our chronology:
- August 17, 2017: Facebook will penalize fake videos in latest news feed algorithm update
- August 2, 2017: Facebook will rank links to slow-loading pages lower in people’s news feeds
- June 30, 2017: Facebook targets individual accounts that post more-than-usual amount of spammy links
- May 17, 2017: Facebook will pinpoint individual posts to better identify clickbait in people’s news feeds
- May 10, 2017: Facebook will penalize links to spammy sites with little original content, many offensive ads
- January 31, 2017: Facebook targets Pages that solicit engagements, such as likes and shares, and post spam
- December 15, 2016: Facebook will demote articles when it finds the people who read them are less likely to share them
- August 11, 2016: Facebook’s changing the news feed again to make it more “informative”
- August 4, 2016: How Facebook is stepping up its whack-a-mole war against clickbait now
- June 29, 2016: Facebook makes Pages’ organic reach in news feed even more dependent on shares
- April 21, 2016: Facebook starts counting time spent when ranking links in people’s feeds
- February 1, 2016: Facebook: News Feed Algorithm Now More Influenced By User Feedback & Surveys
- December 4, 2015: Facebook Tweaks News Feed To Serve Only The Best Viral Stories
- August 2013 through October 2015: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm: A Guide To Recent Changes is our comprehensive article that covers changes over this period.
To learn more generally, also see our Facebook News Feed page, which lists all our stories about it.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
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Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles.
He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.