Last year, Digital Music News started raising serious questions about Facebook video counts and session metrics. That included specific suspicions of wildly inflated average session lengths. But we weren’t the only one — and one year later, a Facebook executive is apologizing for that exact issue.
Facebook has been bull-charging against YouTube for more than a year, with an aggressive video platform launch. They hate that YouTube totally owns video, a format that keeps gaining importance. The only problem is that people go to Facebook for a lot more than just videos, which means a lot of clips are ignored, scrolled through, or played in complete silence.
In fact, the default is that Facebook videos are played in silence, unlike YouTube, where the expectation is the opposite.
But there’s a much, much bigger problem: wildly inflated metrics. Roughly one year ago, we wrote this about Facebook’s reported ‘average session length,’ which we learned starts after a user plays just 3 seconds of a video. Compare that to Youtube, which starts after 30 seconds.
“However, Facebook counts a view as only 3 seconds ‘watched.’ And the sound doesn’t have to be turned on. So all you musicians out there claiming that your videos get way more views on Facebook than YouTube, I encourage you to take a step back and actually check your Facebook video analytics. And, see how many people actually watch past the 30 second mark (where YouTube counts a single view) and how many actually click the video to turn the sound on (they give you this info).”
+ Read: Facebook Video View Counts Mean Nothing. But Snapchat and YouTube’s Matter.
Major advertising agencies, which are booking video spots for their massive clients, also started noticing serious errors in Facebook’s reporting. According to a Wall Street Journal bombshell that dropped this morning, Facebook overstated some video data to Publicis Media by as much as 80%.
So, it looks like artists may have been getting scammed for a long time, and major advertisers are finally rattling the cage. That’s probably why the Wall Street Journal is now reporting this: major advertising agencies finally badgered them enough to run an article.
All of this which raises the question: how accurate is any of the data that artists are getting?
Now, Facebook Vice President of Business and Marketing Partnerships David Fischer has issued the following apology. But in it, Fischer only admits to that one specific error, which is ‘average duration of video viewed’. Turns out that Facebook was only tracking time spent viewing a video when the users watched for a certain minimum time.
Which leads to the next question: what else has been inflated or overlooked? Proceed with caution.