Facebook Vastly Overstates the Number of People Watching Its Videos



Facebook is under fire for inflating its video viewing statistics, overestimating how much video people were watching in their Facebook feeds for nearly two years — by between 60% and 80% — and they may be in deep trouble because of it.

The social media platform says they’ve fixed the problem, and that advertisers will get more accurate information on how potential consumers are responding to their video ads. But the change comes a bit too late for ad buyers who, in some cases, directed millions of dollars to Facebook advertising.

The problem is with Facebook’s “average duration of video viewed” metric, which measures how long users stayed on and watched a particular video ad. The metric failed to take into account viewers who watched the videos for less than three seconds, or viewers who skipped over a video in their feed as it auto-played.

For advertisers, that means they were getting inaccurate — and, likely, inflated — metrics on how well their ad was doing with Facebook users, telling them only the good news about viewers who took time to watch their ads, and none of the bad news about users who skipped over them.

Facebook told advertisers in a statement that, “We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our video metrics…This error has been fixed, it did not impact billing, and we have notified our partners both through our product dashboards and via sales and publisher outreach.”

But as the Wall Street Journal points out, advertisers have already spent thousands — and in some cases millions — selecting Facebook’s ad platform for its incredible performance. And for most advertisers with limited budgets, it’s likely they selected Facebook over similar platforms like Twitter, Google+, and Instagram due to the relative performance of their ads, based on feedback and metrics they were receiving from Facebook.

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It’s unlikely, for those companies, that a simple “I’m sorry” from Facebook will suffice. For failing to be truthful, Facebook, a publicly traded corporation, could face an investigation by the SEC for its standards and practices — or from a number of consumer products safety commissions. It could even, potentially, face lawsuits from corporations and ad buyers who feel they’ve been misled.

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