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Facebook Inflated Video Viewing Stats For Two Years (cnet.com)
Facebook has admitted inflating the average time people spend watching videos for two years by failing to count people who watched for less than three seconds. CNET reports: The metric was artificially inflated because it only counted videos as viewed if they had been seen for three or more seconds, not taking into account shorter views, the company revealed several weeks ago in a post on its advertiser help center web page. Facebook has been putting a greater emphasis on video in recent years, particularly live video. In March, Facebook began giving anyone with a phone and internet connection an easy way to broadcast live video to the 1.7 billion people who use its service every day.
They've lied about their news feed provenance, they've lied about censorship, now they lie about video statistics. The whole site is a cesspool. The day is rare when someone isn't asking me about a factually inaccurate FB ad trying to scam old people.
Taking it offline would benefit all of humanity. It's as bad as e-mail at this point.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I wonder how many of their customers relied on Facebook's own measure of advertising performance...
It's only dishonest if they exclude sessions of less than 3 sessions from the "average duration" statistic but include them in the "number of views" statistic.
If they exclude them from both, it's perfectly reasonable. Still good to disclose the methodology, of course.
This isn't awful as these things go, considering that those probably count more as accidental clicks.
They only measure the time the video is played, not how long it is viewed.
Sig?
I'm not really surprised, since the videos are not monetized. Youtube has to pay content creators so if they inflate viewership, it costs them money. On Facebook, it allows them to show striking numbers, gain publicity, and try and leverage their platform.
Imagine they would count people "watching" videos for less than 3 seconds (read: people who click something, notice it's a video, go "fuck this shit, I ain't watching a video now!" and close it). Would that cause an uproar? You bet it would. "Bah, cheating, people aren't really watching that, it's just clickbait and they get lured there, people aren't really interested in the video, FB is only trying to say so to be relevant, people go to YouTube for videos..." and so on.
I'd be the last defender of FB (as far as I am concerned, the day they finally croak should be called "privacy day"), but what exactly should they have done?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Taken at face value the CNET summary would imply that they were actually correctly stating views since their methodology was excluding shorter views. The full explanation from Facebook makes it clearer:
We had previously *defined* the Average Duration of Video Viewed as "total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who have played the video." But we erroneously had *calculated* the Average Duration of Video Viewed as "the total time spent watching a video divided by *only* the number of people who have viewed a video for three or more seconds."
[not counting
Gotta be sure to count autoplaying videos for number of videos viewed and time viewing videos, so long as you don't count the people who are quick enough killing the stupid annoying video that it would negatively impact the average view time.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Let me inflate the time I give a shit about fakebook...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Should that be counted?
Some probably clicked accidentally, and it should not be.
Some probably clicked, went "Ugh!" and closed it. Probably should be.
On balance, it probably should not be. Non-scandal.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Twitch doesn't just over report view statistics but they have an army of bots that artificially inflate stats by the hundreds or thousands. Watch any major gaming tournament on twitch and you'll see that the majority of viewers are tens of thousands of bots. Everything about Twitch is based on a false economy. The only streaming service that even attempts to display accurate statistics is YouTube. When advertisers see a disparity between views, clicks, and products/services sold they'll eventually see through the complete and utter bullshit that is Twitch. Facebook is worse than myspace for lying to its users. YouTube is the only site I trust for at least somewhat realistic metrics.
Huh.
I just ignore them. And if I hear a company name, I put it in my Boycott list.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The last BIG time this happen, Zuck had to vamoosh from Harvard before they were to Kick His Ass out.
Ha ha
I'm sure someone from the public cares about this..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Remember that Exec who said: "Soon all content will be video"? Now we know why, just another lying F-book exec.
No, really, who is in Facebook? I created a Facebook account a few years ago, so I could use as a convenient way to access sites that require you register. I never ever log into my Facebook account directly; in fact, I have no clue about what it contains, if anything. The kicker is, most people in my professional and social circles seem to be using their Facebook accounts in a similar fashion. More damning, their kids seem to feel embarrassed about the possibility of having to use Facebook. Leaving aside the obvious bias in my personal experience, who is using Facebook actively, in the sense that they log into their accounts and regularly post stuff there?
It was WSJ that broke the story this morning, CNet is summarizing it.
The original article is here.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fa...
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I work at a company that tracks video metrics and we don't include metrics from Facebook videos at all because they are garbage.