Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook

Q3 2023 report

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Widely Viewed Content Report aims to provide more transparency and context about what people are seeing on Facebook by sharing the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts for a given quarter on Feed in the United States. We provide insights into the various content types that appear on Feed to help people better understand our distribution systems and how they influence the content 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:

• Context on the report’s methodology and additional information that may help you understand this report can be found in our Companion Guide. A summary of changes in each report can also be found in our Changes, Corrections and Adjustments page. An archive of prior reports can be found here.

• This report shares data on views and viewers of content in Feed, including recommended content, seen in the United States between 2023-07-01 and 2023-09-30 (referred to as “Q3 2023” in this report). All data and statistics in this report adhere to these parameters.

• This report doesn’t include ads or content viewed outside of Feed, like on Watch, Marketplace or other places within the app. All data and statistics in this report adhere to these parameters. You can read more about our data inclusion and exclusion methodology in the Companion Guide.

• The view and viewer counts in this report are based on views on both public and private content. However, the tables highlighting our top content may include content which was publicly available but subsequently removed by the original content creator or by Facebook, or whose audience has changed. To respect privacy, we won’t display the original content, but will instead leave a placeholder and share whether it was a Facebook or user-initiated change.

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

• Given Facebook's size, it may be difficult to interpret the scale of content views in this report. To help, at the beginning of the domains, links, Pages and posts sections we share data to help contextualize how widely the content was viewed. As an example, you can see in the chart below that the content seen by the most people — as described in this report — still comprise only a small portion of the total number of content views, because, given the customized nature of Feed, most of what people see on Facebook is uniquely personalized.

Report terminology:

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

Content View

is 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 Viewer

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

Domain

refers 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."

Subdomain

refers 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."

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. The report does not consider email addresses to be links.

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. If content received views both as organic content and as an ad, we will count the organic view but not the views on the ad.

Page

refers to public entities 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.

Connected Content

refers to content in someone’s Feed from people they have added as a friend, Groups they have joined, or Pages they have followed.

Unconnected Content

refers to content in someone’s Feed that did not come from friends, Pages people followed, or Groups that they were a part of. Recommended content is unconnected.

Ads

refers to content that gained some or all of its distribution using one of Facebook’s advertising tools.

What a typical Feed looks like

By far, the most common experience in Feed for people in the US is to see posts without links, from their friends, or from Groups they’ve joined.

Where posts in Feed come from

In Q3 2023, 65.0% of views came from posts shared by people’s friends, from Groups people had joined, or Pages they had followed (see breakdown below). Of the remaining 35.0% of Feed content views in the US during Q3 2023, 23.7% came from in Feed recommendations, which show people content from sources they are not connected to, but we think they might be interested in; we refer to this content as ‘unconnected posts’. The last 11.3% came from less common products, such as Events, and logging discrepancies.

Where most Feed views come from

95.0% of the views in the US during Q3 2023 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. For the 5.0% of views in posts that did include a link, they typically came from a Page the person followed (this includes posts which may also have had photos and videos, in addition to links).

You can see all this summarized in the following table:

Widely viewed content overview

The following sections include the domains, links, Pages and individual posts that were viewed by the most content viewers in the US during Q3 2023. Each section starts with data to help contextualize how widely viewed the content was, and then presents the Top-20 pieces of content in order from most to least content viewers. Our goal is to be transparent about our most viewed content on Facebook’s Feed (as measured by total number of content viewers). However, even though our most viewed content might have a very large number of content viewers, as measured as a percentage of all of Facebook content viewers, they represent only a small fraction of total views in Feed in the US that quarter. In short, it is uncommon for different people to see the same content in their Feed.

To learn more about how content was included in this report, read about how content is recommended in Feed, how our algorithms try to predict what people want to see out of trillions of eligible posts, or how we reduce reduce problematic content.