Facebook’s biggest boondoggle is hyping its video viewership
new york — Facebook has been accused of misleading advertisers about the viewership of its video content. The important question isn’t whether the social-media company didn’t tell advertisers as soon as it knew it had inflated the numbers (it says it did) but whether the video-content boom, which the social network has actively fueled since 2014, reflects any consumer demand.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the previous two years, Facebook overestimated the attention videos got on its platform by using a metric that exaggerated the average amount of time users spent looking at a video. The higher number led advertisers to believe that users had a higher engagement with their content than Facebook actually achieved.
A group of small advertisers sued the company. Now, based on internal Facebook documents the plaintiffs obtained during the proceedings, they claim that Facebook knew about the error for a long time before reporting it and that video statistics were overstated by a greater factor than previously reported. But these details only matter to advertisers, who have been trying to force Facebook to allow more external auditing of its metrics.
What matters to the world at large, and to news organisations in particular, is, as Laura Hazard Owen of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has pointed out, whether Facebook has used inaccurate metrics to convince the publishing industry to stress video content to the detriment of reading matter. I’d even argue that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not important whether or not the data Facebook used to build up the video hype, which caused some news organisations to invest heavily in video production rather than writers and other producers of written content, were faulty. What matters is whether users want all the video that’s being dumped on them today — or whether media managers should rethink the pivot.
Even as they reported inflated video viewership to advertisers, Facebook executives pushed the idea that video was wildly popular among social media users, to the extent that their entire feeds would eventually consist of little else. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said so in 2014 and again in 2016; at both times the viewership miscalculation was going on. At the same time, other platforms, such as SnapChat and Twitter, were also reporting growing video viewership. That’s only natural because, like Facebook, they were encouraging the posting of that content as a way to sell more expensive ads. So publishers decided to go with the apparent trend, sometimes resulting in layoffs of written-word journalists.
There’s no question that people watch videos, and that the social networks’ push in that direction has mattered. For a 2017 paper, Antonis Kalogeropoulos of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University looked at news video consumption patterns and found some growth between 2014 and 2016.
But over the same two years, video’s share of internet traffic increased more dramatically than video news consumption in most of these countries — from 60.3 per cent in 2014 to 67.7 in 2016. That means people’s consumption of other types of video — such as Netflix movies — grew faster than their consumption of news video. And there’s no way to track how much more video was pushed at consumers as the boom began, but never really watched.