Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook

Q2 2021 report

Table of Contents

Overview

Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook. In this first quarterly report, our goal is to provide clarity around what people see in their Facebook News Feed, the different content types that appear in their Feed and the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter. We believe this new report, when paired with the engagement data available in CrowdTangle, represents a more complete picture of what people see on Facebook. We plan to expand the scope of this report in future iterations. It will continue to appear in conjunction with our quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report.

A few things to note:

• More information to help contextualize this report can be found in the Companion Guide.

• The report captures views of public content in News Feed, including recommended content, seen in the United States between April 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021 (referred to as “Q2 2021” in this report). All data and statistics in this report adhere to these parameters.

• The report doesn’t include ads or the things people viewed outside of News Feed, like on Watch, Marketplace or other places within the app. All data and statistics in this report adhere to these parameters.

• The report may include content which have been subsequently taken down by the original content creator or by Facebook, or whose audience has changed. In these cases, to respect privacy we won’t display the original content, but will instead leave a placeholder.

• Due to rounding, some totals included in the report may not equal the sum of the separate figures.

• Because there’s so much content on Facebook, the items seen by the most people — as described in this report — still comprise only a small portion of the total number of content views. To provide a sense of this, each of the widely viewed content sections starts with the percentage of views those items received relative to the total number of views in News Feed in the US during the same time period (Q2 2021). As an example, you can see in the chart below that content views of the posts in this report represent less than one-tenth of a percent of all News Feed content views by US users during Q2 2021. That’s because, given the customized nature of News Feed, most of what people see on Facebook is personalized for them specifically.

Report terminology:

Here are some terms found in the report and what they mean:

Content View

is what is counted whenever a piece of content appears in News Feed. If there are multiple pieces of content in a post, the view is assigned to the post.

Content Viewer

is an account who viewed a piece of content on News Feed. This metric is estimated.

Domain

refers to the name of a website.

Link

refers 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.

News Feed

is 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 Content

refers to any post that is not an advertisement.

Page

refers to public pages created by businesses, brands, celebrities, creators, media outlets and more.

Posts with a link

is any post that has an external link included in it. The report does not consider email addresses to be links.

What kinds of posts people are seeing in News Feed

Most content views in News Feed during Q2 2021 came from posts shared by the friends, Groups and Pages people were connected to (for example, people they had chosen to add as a friend, Groups they had joined, Pages they followed and so on). In fact, only about 9.5% of all News Feed content views in the US during Q2 2021 came from content that was not shared by Groups people joined, friends or Pages people follow.

Organic News Feed content views in the US during Q2 2021, broken down by source of the content.

The vast majority of content viewed in News Feed during Q2 2021 (87.1%) did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. Only about 12.9% of News Feed content views in the US during Q2 2021 were on posts that contain links. Most of these links are in posts shared by Pages that people follow (this includes posts which may also have had photos and videos, in addition to links). This means that the majority of News Feed content views in the US were on posts without links and were from content viewers' friends or from Groups they were connected to. Content that did not come from friends, Pages people followed, or Groups that they were a part of, also referred to as unconnected posts, made up a relatively minor percentage of content views.

Widely viewed content

The following sections include the domains, links, Pages and individual posts that were viewed by the most content viewers in the US during Q2 2021. We previously shared how content is recommended in News Feed, how our algorithms try to predict what people want to see out of the trillions of posts that are eligible and how we reduce problematic content by taking into account a combination of integrity signals, such as how likely a piece of content is to violate our policies. While the total number of US content viewers who saw content from these domains, links, Pages or posts in Q2 2021 was high, the content views that this content received comprised only a small fraction of the total content views in News Feed in the US that quarter.