That means Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when the videos are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live, Facebook said in a blog post.

The differentiation from normal videos reflects the large number of viewers attracted to live videos. “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live. This is because Facebook Live videos are more interesting in the moment than after the fact,” wrote Vibhi Kant, product manager, and Jie Xu, software engineer. 

The Facebook Live announcement came two weeks after the company updated its video metrics in Page Insights.  The video updates included three new metrics: Minutes viewed, 10-second views and sound-on versus sound-off. Facebook also is now expanding live videos to Android from IOS. 

Separately, NewsWhip used its database to measure viewership of Facebook videos posted by five publishers, CNN, Huffington Post, BBC News, Elite Daily and Upworthy. Video viewership increased dramatically at each site as they increased their native video output on their main Facebook pages over the past few months. The survey specifically looked at the months of June, October and February, Liam Corcoran wrote in TheWhip.

The NewsWhip analysis provides graphs that show the growth of video views. Tthe increase was especially sharp in February for these categories:

• Number of native videos posted to main Facebook page per month
• Growth in engagement on video
• Growth in proportion of videos as posts