Facebook Lured Advertisers By Inflating Ad-watch Times Up To 900 Percent (arstechnica.com)

Zorro shares a report from The Mercury News: Not only did Facebook inflate ad-watching metrics by up to 900 percent (Warning: source may be paywalled, alternative source), it knew for more than a year that its average-viewership estimates were wrong and kept quiet about it, a new legal filing claims. A group of small advertisers suing the Menlo Park social media titan alleged in the filing that Facebook "induced" advertisers to buy video ads on its platform because advertisers believed Facebook users were watching video ads for longer than they actually were. That "unethical, unscrupulous" behavior by Facebook constituted fraud because it was "likely to deceive" advertisers, the filing alleged. The latest allegations arose out of a lawsuit that the advertisers filed against Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook in federal court in 2016 over alleged inflation of ad-watching metrics. "Suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false," the company told The Wall Street Journal. "We told our customers about the error when we discovered it -- and updated our help center to explain the issue."

"The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status to bring other advertisers into the legal action, plus unspecified damages," reports The Mercury News. "They also want the court to order a third-party audit of Facebook's video-ad metrics."

Comments

Facebook taking more hits than Mohammed Ali

[commodore64_love]

Russian ads... fake news... losing customer data to hacks... caught lying to advertisers about # of views.

How much more punishment can this company take, before it goes down?

Re:Facebook taking more hits than Mohammed Ali

[Zaelath]

You're forgetting the massively inflated reach numbers... https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

Re:Facebook taking more hits than Mohammed Ali

[euxneks]

It's not punishment if it's self inflicted...

Re:Facebook taking more hits than Mohammed Ali

[rtb61]

Technically from the point of view of investors, Facebook should be rewarded for it's extremely successful self marketing con and those who should be punished with a rapid firing, those who bought that worthless ad space, it's capitalism baby.

Those marketing idiots that bought worthless ad space, might just keep their jobs if they get the money back. These are the small players, how about the big advertisers, they could strip mine Facebook to death, they will be paying attention, especially during discovery.

All the internet marketing engines are going to come under increasing value auditing, what they really produce, what they really sell, how capable they really are and how much their ad space is really worth. Reality is, they simply advertise too much really shit stuff and the marketing of that, tarnishes every high quality product they try to market. From the consumers point of view, you see an ad for some shite bit of rubbish out of China and the next ad you see, right along side of that, Mercedes, they an erection dysfunction herbal remedy and then, Yves Saint Laurent, then online gambling in some tax haven, then Coca Cola, then a blatant ponzi scheme, then an actual government advertisement (seriously you want people to believe you mixing you advertisement with that rubbish). You get the problem, quality advertising used to be completely separate from junkvertising, now they are right along side each other. Some stupid make you penis grow ad, right along side a Samsung Phone ad, yeah the penis ad by associating damages the market penetration of the Samsung ad, it comes off just as limp as the bigger penis ad.

Why was very little said earlier, hey, we liked the free content and fuck advertising, quite humorous to see the scammers at Facebook, Google, M$ et al conning all the advertisers. The platform leaves an image, mix junkvertising with quality product information and well, hang around with wild dogs and expect fleas. Of course they lie about the virtues of their advertising platform, that is their number one advertising product, themselves and of course they track the individuals buying their add space, to ensure, those targeted individuals see their ads all of the fucking time, suckers (the customers, oh no, they hardly ever see your ad and when they do it is buried under a flood of junkvertising)

Re:Facebook taking more hits than Mohammed Ali

[e432776]

I'm beginning to think Facebook is not a very ethical company!

Honest Mistake

[sexconker]

It was an honest mistake, and I'll be sure to have my team follow up with you on the details, Congressman.

Re:Are there tech companies that don't do this?

[Narcocide]

Well, fudging the numbers to some degree is necessary. The degree to which Facebook has done it here however is unprecedented when combined with how many big advertisers they've defrauded for how long and for how much.

Commerce IS deceit

[sgage]

After a corporation attains a certain size, it's all cheating, rigging, corrupting, deceiving. 'Advertising' and 'marketing'. I.e., deceit. 'Twas ever thus, and is still, and will always be. Big business is dirty. It's only a matter of what has been found out. MS, Apple, Google, all reached a certain size and became evil. Facebook is different - it was evil from day one :-)

Re:Commerce IS deceit

[sgage]

Exactly. And when corporations achieve a certain wealth, they are able to take all these oh-too-human foibles to the extreme. And they do. Every time. It doesn't matter who the founders were, because by the time a corporation gets that big, the bean counters and marketers are in charge. Happens. Every. Time.

Autoplay

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising is why Autoplay is defaulted to on, to defraud the advertisers stats, yes your video was served to [everyuser] in your demographic, wether a human actually requested it is something we measure but are not telling you, we served your advert to a device, job done, fuck you, pay us.