The discussion prompted Mosseri to offer more detail. For one thing, he clarified that these decisions are happening on an “aggregate level, not an individual level,” so it’s not a situation where individual viewer engagement will affect the quality of the video that’s played for them.

“We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views,” Mosseri added. “It’s not a binary [threshold], but rather a sliding scale.”