Facebook’s ‘Inflated’ Average Video View Time: An Apology and its Implications

Compared to the video-sharing titan YouTube and other widely-used platforms such as Dailymotion, Facebook is still a young entrepreneur in the realm of social videos. However, the social media giant took the world by storm when it announced its decision to monetize their rapidly growing video space by adopting YouTube’s model of revenue-sharing with dedicated content creators. This strategic move prompted a noteworthy surge in Facebook’s video views. As of November last year, Facebook was recording a staggering 8 billion video views every day, doubling the views recorded in April in the same year. Consequently, Facebook was being distinctly recognized as a formidable competitor to YouTube Nonetheless, Facebook’s methodology for counting ‘views’ drew significant criticism. A video was marked as ‘viewed’ after a mere 3 seconds on Facebook, as opposed to YouTube’s more stringent 30 seconds. This discrepancy did little to sway advertisers away from Facebook’s increasingly popular video service, leading to a considerable expansion of Facebook’s digital advert space market share to 12%, trailing only behind Google, who holds roughly 31% of the market.

Ever since, the credibility of Facebook’s video view claims has been a subject of debate. On a recent Friday, Facebook conceded to this criticism. David Fischer, Facebook’s VP for Business and Marketing Partnerships, publicly apologized for ‘inflating’ the average view time on Facebook’s video platform.

Fisher admitted that for years, the average view duration was incorrectly calculated. This figure is supposed to reflect the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. However, Facebook’s calculation omitted viewers who did not watch the video for at least three seconds. According to Fischer, this misstep overstated the average view duration, violating the trust of their partners.

Fisher added that their partners had been informed about the error, which was discovered a month prior, and that Facebook had extended its apologies. However, this two-year delay in reporting the glitch has incited dissatisfaction among many stakeholders, including the ad buying agency Publicis Media. The company expressed its outrage in the Wall Street Journal, stating that this emphasizes the absolute need for third-party tagging and verification on Facebook’s platform.

Despite the controversy, Facebook’s popularity remains unscathed, as it still boasts the largest user base across social networks with 1.7 billion users on its main platform, and 1 billion on Messenger and WhatsApp. Its subsidiary Instagram, which was purchased for $1 billion in 2012, boasts over 500 million users. Only time will tell whether this scandal will have any substantial impact on their revenue and appeal to advertisers.