Facebook inflated video metrics for two years

The average time spent viewing video is an important metric for marketers as the longer consumers watch a video, the more likely they are to feel connected to the content and remember a brand the next time they are shopping.

Facebook is a formidable force in social media advertising, with eMarketer estimating that the platform would take nearly 68 percent of all social media advertising spend worldwide in 2015. Metrics such as the one Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) inflated are the reason advertisers are starting to shun Twitter and favor Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). Traffic metrics also drive ad pricings.

“While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously”, Fischer explained. “The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video”, Fischer wrote. But the mix-up and its repercussions serve to highlight, yet again, just how powerful Facebook has become as an advertising and media firm – and how its own, secret formulas and internal calculations can affect a bevy of other businesses.

Despite enthusiasm for Facebook’s rapidly growing audience for video, some had already expressed concerns about the way the company counted views, which autoplay in users’ news feeds.

And we remain bullish on the Facebook stock price in 2016 and beyond.

Some advertising agency executives made a decision to dig a bit deeper into the claim, prompting the social network to hand over a more detailed report. Facebook said was introducing a new metric to fix the problem.

Facebook said in a statement that the old video-viewing metrics did not impact billing for advertisers and that it has notified partners. The reason behind this was that Facebook did not include views that lasted less than three seconds thereby inflating the average viewing time. As detailed by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook threw out video views under three seconds when calculating view time, dramatically overstating its average. “Two years of reporting inflated performance numbers is unacceptable”.

For at least the past two years, Facebook has been touting some really stellar user video statistics and raking in huge piles of cash from advertisers in the process. However, upon inquiries, some ad agency executives were given more detailed data.