Facebook News Feed Ranking Trade-off: Event Posts Versus Video Content
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for News Feed at Facebook. Posts about events that users could attend and videos both compete for the limited space in a user's feed. How would you decide whether News Feed should show events or videos?
```hint Look past the next session
Events and videos serve different needs and lose value at different speeds. What does each one do for the user and for Facebook over weeks, not just in the current visit, and how could you compare the two on one scale?
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the decision about a single feed slot for one user, the overall share of events and videos in News Feed, or which content type the team should invest in?
- What is News Feed optimizing today: time spent, meaningful interactions between people, long-term retention or revenue?
- Which events count: friends' events, public events from pages and groups, or both? Does video include short-form and live video?
- Are there fixed constraints, such as ad load or a separate video surface, that limit what the feed can change?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear decision scope and goal, with the user and business value of events and of videos stated explicitly
- Differences that matter for ranking: supply, expiry, location, social context and how each type is consumed
- A method that puts both types on a common value scale, per user and per context, instead of one blanket choice for everyone
- Metrics for each type plus shared long-term outcomes and guardrails, checked through experiments that include long-running holdouts
- Effects on event hosts and video creators, and edge cases such as users with few friends nearby
### Follow-up Questions
- Giving videos more weight raises time spent but lowers event responses and the number of new events hosts create. How do you make the call?
- Most event attendance happens offline. How would you measure whether showing an event led someone to go?
- How would your answer change for a new user with few friends compared with a long-time user with an active local network?
Overview: A Meta product manager question about Facebook News Feed: how should the feed decide between showing events and showing videos? It tests framing the goal, comparing the long-term value of each content type, putting both on a common ranking scale, choosing metrics and experiments, and weighing effects on event hosts and creators.