Facebook over the past two years, overstated the time of video views by 60-80%

A few weeks ago, Facebook, in its post at the Advertiser Help Center (Help Center for advertisers), announced that it changes the method of calculating the time that a user spends watching videos. The main change was the consideration of all views, and not just lasting more than three seconds.

Some advertisers had questions for Facebook and they demanded more complete information from the social network. It turned out that according to the old algorithm, the time of viewing video materials was overestimated by 60-80% relative to the real state of affairs. Most of the questions arose from the company Publicis Media, through which marketers around the world in 2015 bought advertising from Facebook for $ 77 billion.

Today, Facebook has made a formal apology for the incorrect data that marketers have been providing for the past two years. The company's vice president, David Fisher, explains what happened in his post:

About a month ago, we found an error in calculating the video viewing metrics, where the average viewing time was displayed. The metric was supposed to display the total amount of time spent watching the video, divided by the number of viewers. But this was not the case. The metric reflected all the time the video was viewed, but it was divided only by the number of viewers who gave it three or more seconds. This is what led to an overestimation of indicators.

What happened can seriously undermine Facebook's position in the video advertising market. For the past two years, the company has been actively reporting on the success of the social networking video service and has constantly talked about the growth of video content consumption within Facebook, misleading marketers and advertisers around the world regarding the effectiveness of this type of advertising.

This news may lead to an outflow of advertisers from Facebook to its competitors in the video advertising market - YouTube, Twitter or even on television. Fisher also hopes that advertisers will not lose their “faith in Facebook” and will forgive the social network for a mistake.

Against the background of this news Facebook shares fell in price by 1.7%.