So here is a funny thing about the social media giant Facebook videos, it turns out people actually weren’t watching the ads on them nearly as much as the social network said. Yes, did you all know that about what am I speaking, let me clear the confusion in simple words, “Facebook lied about its video view metrics for two years”.
Facebook Lied About Its Video-View Metrics For Two Years
The largest social network in the world, Facebook has managed to grow exponentially, more and more associated services, which brings, even more, users. Advertisers videos were one of the much new features that were introduced over the years, but according to the recent reports, it is known now, that social media giant Facebook has provided false figures about their views.
Since 2014, the social media giant Facebook has videos on its platform, making this new form of presentation as its power. At the same time, it has also made available to all advertisers an opportunity to increase their viewers, in this way, their products, generating a greater range and a greater number of views.
But, hold on, what is known now, the social media giant Facebook has manipulated the data presented and left out some data that change completely its scope. Specifically, Facebook did not record all views that lasted less than 3 seconds.
A Facebook spokesperson told “Business Insider” 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. We also renamed the metric to make it clearer what we measure. This metric is one of many our partners use to assess their video campaigns.”
This “small” difference meant that during these four years the average viewing time was over-estimated at around 60-80%, leading advertising agencies to be deceived and further bet on this platform.
In addition, to admit this mistake, Facebook announced that it also changed the way to measure, and will now be two more metrics that give a more accurate picture of the views and their average time.
Video Watch Average Time: the total watch time for your video, divided by the total number of video plays. This includes plays Que start automatically and click on. This will replace the Average Duration of Video Viewed metric.
Video Percentage Watched: Reflects the percentage of your video somebody watches per session, averaged across all sessions of your video where the video auto-played or was clicked to play. This will replace the Average percent of Video Viewed metric.
Though it does not affect the platform users directly, the difference in average viewing time values has a big impact on the advertising agencies who were betting on Facebook to advertise their products, which after all not had the projection as it is expected.