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Widely Viewed Content Report
Quarterly report on what people see on Facebook, including the content that receives the widest distribution during the quarter.
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Introduction
This guide is a companion to our Widely Viewed Content Report, intended to provide additional context about the report and help people interpret its content.
Scope of the Report’s Data
The Widely Viewed Content Report provides a quarterly overview of the content that reaches the most people on Facebook’s Feed in the United States. At the start of each report we indicate the data segment it will cover. To date, our Widely Viewed Content Reports:
cover one fiscal quarter
include data from viewers in the US only
include the top 20 most widely viewed domains, links, Pages and posts in Feed
include content recommended by Facebook within Feed units like Suggested For You and Reels
exclude ads
All of the insights, statistics and content contained in the report pertain only to this data segment. We expect future editions of this report will expand. There were a variety of considerations that went into choosing the data for this report, i.e., user privacy, data accuracy, operational feasibility, among others. The report scope you see today is a product of balancing these considerations with an ambition to provide increasing transparency over time.
Content View & Viewer Data
We use content 'views' and 'viewers' as the primary metric in the Widely Viewed Content Report. A content view is registered when a piece of content appears on someone’s Feed, meaning it covers at least half of the screen on a phone, computer, or tablet, and was viewed for at least a quarter of a second. Note that views of content in the carousel at the top of Feed are not included in our computations. Content viewers refers to the number of people (as measured by the number of unique Facebook accounts) who have viewed a piece of content. This means if the same person viewed the same piece of content every morning for a week, it would count as seven views, but only one viewer.
We have chosen to highlight view and viewer data in this report because we want to provide greater clarity into what public content is most popular on Facebook, beyond the unique and personalized content people tend to see on their Feed. We believe that view and viewer data is a helpful complement to other data that Meta already makes available, and provides more transparency into content distribution on Facebook.
Note that we use the same measurement methodology for Reels as we do for videos, meaning users do not need to watch a Reel or video for it to be considered a view.
Data Methodology
Total views calculation
The total number of views used to calculate the percentage of content views on Facebook includes the number of content views on Feed that are not ads and are from viewers in the US.
Typical News Feed composition calculation
This section breaks out the percentage of each content category on Feed -- specifically posts from friends and people followed, posts from groups joined, posts from Pages followed, unconnected posts and other. These categories can overlap as, for example, your friends can also post in groups. For simplicity in the report, the Widely Viewed Content Report buckets content based on the first category it falls into, in this order from most common to least:
recommended content
posts from friends and people followed
posts from Pages followed
posts from groups joined
unconnected posts
other, which is content that cannot be bucketed into one of the categories listed above (e.g., Events)
Links
In the Widely Viewed Content Report, when we use the term ‘link’ we refer to a web address that leads to a specific webpage. Note that all links must contain a domain, but sometimes links are just the domain itself. For example, facebook.com is Facebook's homepage as well as its domain. For this reason it may appear that domains are included in the link section of the report, when in fact these are links that contain only domains.
In the Q1’22 Widely Viewed Content Report we changed how we count views on links. To aid with the interpertation of prior reports, we include both methodologies in in this section.
Reports Prior to the Q1’22 Widely Viewed Content Report
Links appear in various locations in posts. For the purposes of this report, we count link views in posts, but not in comments. This means we count a link view when someone sees a link in a post’s text or its preview, but do not count views of links in comments. If a person viewed a link in the text of a post, but the link didn’t render a preview, we still count it as a link view. If a link did render a preview we count it as a link view. In some cases we have had to extract the links from text in order to produce this data set.
While we've optimized for completeness with links in the report, it's also important the data is as meaningful as possible. These are the inclusions/exclusions principles we’ve implemented for links:
| Inclusion Principle(s) | Exclusion Principle(s) |
|---|---|
Links, whether they rendered a preview or not, are included in the report. | Emails and email logins are excluded. |
Links from Facebook-owned domains (such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) are excluded. | |
Link shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com are excluded. |
Reports after the Q1’22 Widely Viewed Content Report
We count a link view when someone sees a link that rendered a preview in a post. We exclude links that were posted as comments.
While we've optimized for completeness with links in the report, it's also important the data is as meaningful as possible. These are the inclusions/exclusions principles we’ve implemented for links:
| Inclusion Principle(s) | Exclusion Principle(s) |
|---|---|
Links, only if they rendered a preview, are included in the report. | Emails and email logins are excluded. |
Links from Facebook-owned domains (such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) are excluded. | |
Link shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com are excluded. | |
Links that did not render a preview are excluded. |
Domains
In the Widely Viewed Content Report, when we use the term ‘domain’ we refer to the domain name of a website. A domain name is a unique name that identifies a website. For example, the domain name of Facebook is "facebook.com."
To produce the list of domains shared in the report, we start with links that people viewed and then identify their domain. Since domains are based on links, the exclusions/inclusions that are applied to links will also be applied for domains. Also note that today, if our systems think a subdomain, such as m.facebook.com, is different from its domain, i.e., facebook.com, the reach we compute for the two will be independent— the subdomain’s reach will not be included in the domain’s reach. This is an area where we are exploring data methodology changes. These are the inclusion/exclusion principles for domains:
| Inclusion Principle(s) | Exclusion Principle(s) |
|---|---|
Domains from links that follow our link inclusion principles. | Emails and email logins are excluded. |
Links from Facebook-owned domains (such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) are excluded. | |
Link shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com are excluded. |
Posts
In the Widely Viewed Content Report, when we use the term ‘post’ we refer to the foundational unit of Feed. Posts can have different formats and can contain videos, images, links, or plain text. All posts that are viewed in Feed are accounted for in the report, and for reshares, we attribute both views and viewers to the original post (i.e. the root of the reshare chain). We currently do not apply any exclusions to Posts. These are the inclusion/exclusion principles for posts:
| Inclusion Principle(s) | Exclusion Principle(s) |
|---|---|
All connected and unconnected posts that are live on Facebook can be included in the report. | Data is not excluded, but posts will not render if the content owner changes post privacy, FB takes down the post, the content owner deletes the post, or if the account is disabled by either the owner or Facebook. |
Pages
In the Widely Viewed Content Report, when we use the term 'Page' we refer to public Pages created by businesses, brands, celebrities, creators, media outlets and more. All Pages that are viewed in Feed are accounted for in the report. When a piece of content from a Page is reshared, we attribute both content views and viewers to the original creator (i.e. the root of the reshare chain). We currently do not apply any exclusions to Pages. These are the inclusion/exclusion principles for Pages:
| Inclusion Principle(s) | Exclusion Principle(s) |
|---|---|
All Pages that are publicly available on Facebook can be included in the report. | None |
How we evaluate and improve our metrics
Meta conducts a detailed internal review of data shared in our report to validate our metrics, and has established rigorous standards that govern how we identify, correct, and publicly report any adjustments to previously released data. We also conduct a number of periodic checks to verify the accuracy of our data and identify significant errors. Currently, the report has not undergone analysis and input from external parties. We are considering how to establish external validation for the future reports. As with all aspects of our Widely Viewed Content reporting, we will continue to evolve and improve our review processes over time.
Considerations
The accuracy of our data and measurements is our top priority, so how we define and measure views may change, as we improve our methodologies, logging and upstream metric computation; consequently, historical comparisons may be imperfect. We recognize that trends are important, so we’ll include comparisons to previous reports where possible as the Widely Viewed Content Report matures. All numbers in the report are rounded, and due to rounding, some totals included in the report may not equal the sum of the separate figures.
Note that the data that is included in this report includes engagement from both public and private (content that was once public but is now private) content. However, since we take privacy seriously at Meta, Content in tables will not render if the content owner increases post privacy, FB takes down the post, the content owner deletes the post, or if the account is disabled by either the owner or FB. See each section above for details on how it is handled specifically for posts, Pages, links and domains.
In any given quarter, the report may include posts that have been subsequently taken down by the original content creator or by Facebook, posts that have been subsequently made non-Public, or links that no longer exist. For privacy reasons we won’t display the original content, but will instead leave a placeholder and designate whether it was a Facebook or user-initiated change. For more information, see our Data Policy.
Removed Content
Meta aims to share as much context about the most widely viewed content on our platform as possible, including the content we removed and the reasons for its removal.
Overview of Feed
What gets prioritized in Feed
Your Feed can connect you to who and what matters most: your people, your interests, and your world together in one place. Our goal is to make sure you see the posts that are most valuable to you at the top of your Feed every time you open Facebook — and because most people have more content in their Feed than they could reasonably browse in one session, we use algorithms to determine the order of the posts you see. The friends you connect with, Groups you join, Pages you follow, comments you make, and responses you leave on surveys are indicators of what content you may find meaningful, and the algorithms predict what you are likely to find most valuable based on your activity and direct feedback. For example, if it’s content from your friends or family, if you’ve indicated that it’s worth your time, or if it’s likely to foster a meaningful interaction, then the algorithm increases the post’s relevance score, which typically results in the content appearing closer to the top of your Feed. You can read more about our approach to ranking here.
What gets reduced distribution in Feed
There are some kinds of posts that people have told us they don’t want to see, or that are broadly understood to be harmful. We remove content from Facebook altogether when it violates our Community Standards and poses a real risk of harm, like graphic violence, hate speech, or fake COVID cures. We also use Feed ranking to reduce distribution of posts that may contain content that people find objectionable, but which doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of removal under the Community Standards. Our Content Distribution Guidelines go into detail about the types of content that receive reduced distribution, and explain why we've decided to reduce distribution for each particular type of content. In any given quarter, some of the top 20 lists may contain lower-quality content; we're always working to improve our automated detection systems to better identify and reduce the distribution of these kinds of items in News Feed. You can find more about our Content Distribution Guidelines here.
If you want to learn more about Feed, here are some additional resources:
How Does News Feed Predict What You Want to See? and How Does News Feed Predict What You Want to See?
News Feed Algorithm - Jan 2021
Remove, Reduce, Inform: New Steps to Manage Problematic Content - April 2019
Recommendations Guidelines - August 2020
More Control and Context in News Feed - March 2021
Glossary
Content Viewis what is counted whenever a piece of content appears in Feed. If there are multiple pieces of content in a post, the view is assigned to the post.
Content Vieweris an account of who viewed a piece of content on Feed. This metric is estimated.
Domainrefers to the name of a website. A domain name is a unique name that identifies a website. For example, the domain name of Facebook is "facebook.com."
Subdomainrefers to a domain that is part of a larger domain. For example, Facebook’s mobile site "m.facebook.com" is a subdomain of "facebook.com.”
Linkrefers to a web address that leads to a specific webpage. Note that all links must contain a domain, but sometimes links are just the domain itself. For example, facebook.com is Facebook's homepage as well as its domain. For this reason it may appear that domains are included in the link section of the report, when in fact these are links that contain only domains.
Feedis the constantly updating list of posts in the middle of a user’s home page which includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and interactions from people, Pages and Groups.
Organic Contentrefers to any post that is not an advertisement. If content received views both as organic content and as an ad, we will count the organic views but not the views on the ad.
Pagerefers to public pages created by businesses, brands, celebrities, creators, media outlets and more.
Posts with a linkis any post that has an external link included in it.
Connected Contentrefers to content from people someone has added as a friend, Groups they have joined, or Pages they have followed.
Unconnected contentContent from people they had chosen to add as a friend, Groups they had joined, Pages they followed, etc.
Adsrefers to content that gained some or all of its distribution using one of Facebook’s advertising tools.
