Warning To Facebook Users

Facebook recently disclosed that it was “unintentionally” inflating the average time users spend watching videos on the platform.

How so? By only counting a video as “viewed” if it had been seen for more than 3 seconds, meaning anyone who ditched a clip quicker than that wasn’t factored into calculations at all… obviously skewing the numbers dramatically and painted a wildly inaccurate picture for advertisers.

And how inaccurate are we talking? The average time was overestimated by 60% to 80%.

Holy crap…

This is pretty embarrassing for a company that’s calling itself the future of video consumption.

While no advertisers were overcharged as a result of this mess, the miscalculated (and super impressive) engagement data clearly influenced their decision to advertise on Facebook in the first place (instead of, say, YouTube, Twitter, or TV networks).

Moving forward, a new metric, “Average Watch Time,” will replace the faulty “Average Duration of Video Viewed” and reflect video views of all lengths.

But as ad buying agency Publicis Media notes, this change isn’t so much about Facebook doing right by its customers. It’s just them coming up with new names for what they were supposed to measure in the first place.

Time for a change

Advertisers have long been calling for behemoths like Facebook and Google to release their data to third-party firms and enable independent evaluation.

At the moment, these companies keep a tight grip on almost all of it and, according to the CMO of Unilever, it’s essentially like “letting them mark their own homework.”

Hopefully we see some more transparency from Zuck and the Boys after their latest botch job but, let’s be honest, we probably won’t. Just because they throw us a bone doesn’t mean they care if it tastes good or not.

-Courtesy of "The Hustle"