Facebook says it gave advertisers inflated video statistics
Facebook Inc.’s rapid growth has been tightly linked to convincing advertisers that people are watching more videos on its social network. Now the company is disclosing it has been giving marketers an inflated number for the average time being spent viewing online clips.
The company, owner of the world’s largest social network, boosted the figure by only counting a video as “viewed” if it had been seen for more than three seconds. Not included in the calculation was when a person didn’t watch — or watched for less than three seconds. Facebook said it was taking steps to fix the problem and that advertisers weren’t overcharged.
“As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it,” David Fischer, Facebook’s vice-president of business and marketing partnerships, said in a statement Friday. “We informed our partners and made sure to put a notice in the product itself so that anyone who went into their dashboard could understand our error.”
After reviewing other metrics, Facebook concluded that the error had no impact on video statistics the company has shared in the past, such as time spent watching video or the number of video views, according to the statement.
The disclosure may hurt Facebook’s effort to get marketers to augment television campaigns, which carry the largest budgets in advertising, with clips on its social network. The metric Facebook has been giving advertisers doesn’t include the roughly 80 per cent of people who don’t watch online videos at all, or quickly browse past them, according to Rob Norman, chief digital officer at GroupM, an advertising company.
“Nobody is saying Facebook is defrauding anybody, but what they are doing is giving specific measurements which some people may find misleading,” Norman said.
How to classify online video consumption is important to marketers and has long been a source of contention in the industry, Norman said. Figures that show people are, on average, spending a longer-thanexpected amount of time viewing an ad may lead a brand to budget more because it shows potential customers are paying attention.
“If you get a report that says your reach on television was 70 per cent of your audience, and that
What they are doing is giving specific measurements which some people may find misleading.
by adding Facebook you’re reaching 80 per cent of your audience, you may spend more,” Norman said.
Martin Sorrell, chief executive officer of WPP, the world’s largest advertising company, said Facebook’s miscalculation increases the need for an independent body like ComScore Inc. to play a bigger role in overseeing important metrics.
“We have also been calling for a long time for media owners like Facebook and Google not to mark their own homework and release data to ComScore to enable independent evaluation,” said Sorrell, whose company owns GroupM and has invested in ComScore. “The referee and player cannot be the same person.”