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

Posted by msmash on 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.

6 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook lies: shocker by HBI · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Facebook lies: shocker by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would you include people who watched a video for less than 3 seconds? Would you say you've read a book because you glanced at the cover? Or seen a movie because you saw a 30-second trailer (okay, that last one, too often the trailers contain all the interesting stuff, so you're wasting your time watching the movie, but you get what I mean(.

      As long as you don't include those people in the "total viewers" category, I see no problem.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    2. Re:Facebook lies: shocker by jittles · · Score: 2

      Why would you include people who watched a video for less than 3 seconds? Would you say you've read a book because you glanced at the cover? Or seen a movie because you saw a 30-second trailer (okay, that last one, too often the trailers contain all the interesting stuff, so you're wasting your time watching the movie, but you get what I mean(.

      As long as you don't include those people in the "total viewers" category, I see no problem.

      It's Facebook being shady. They added the autoplay feature so that they could drive this metric and then excluded the people that intentionally skipped these videos they didn't want to autoplay to begin with.

  2. Anyhow by pahles · · Score: 2

    They only measure the time the video is played, not how long it is viewed.

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    Sig?
  3. It would have been better the other way round? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. Confusing summary from CNET article by JoeyRox · · 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."