Facebook Inflated Video Viewing Stats For Two Years (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday September 23, 2016 @02:40AM from the fake-it-if-you-can't-make-it dept.

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.

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Confusing summary from CNET article by JoeyRox · 2016-09-23 03:06 · Score: 4, Informative

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."