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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

James B. Stewart writes at the NYT that the average user spends over fifty minutes each day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms [nytimes.com]. That's more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours) [bls.gov]. “When you really think about it, 50 minutes is a tremendous amount of time — it’s huge,” says Ken Sena. But time has become the holy grail of digital media and Facebook wants more of yours. Time is the best measure of engagement, and engagement correlates with advertising effectiveness. Time also increases the supply of impressions that Facebook can sell, which brings in more revenue (a 52 percent increase last quarter to $5.4 billion). And time enables Facebook to learn more about its users — their habits and interests — and thus better target its ads. The result is a powerful network effect that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

But fifty minutes isn't enough. Facebook is busy cooking up ways to get us to spend even more time on the platform, building a real-time news tool that could kill Twitter, testing shopping products that could take on Amazon, and making its own YouTube.. A crucial initiative is improving its News Feed [slate.com], tailoring it more precisely to the needs and interests of its users, based on how long people spend reading particular posts. For people who demonstrate a preference for video, more video will appear near the top of their news feed. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more data they will generate about themselves, and the better the company will get at the task [washingtonpost.com]. “The time people spend on our site is a good measure of whether we’re delivering value to them.," says Jessie Baker. "The better we do at providing what people most want to see, the more likely they are to return to the app and spend time.”

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