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Facebook exaggerates key video viewing metric; advertisers given inflated data

By Amy R. Connolly
Social media giant Facebook inflated average video viewing times nfrom its platform by as much as 80 percent for two years, the company said. Photo courtesy Facebook
Social media giant Facebook inflated average video viewing times nfrom its platform by as much as 80 percent for two years, the company said. Photo courtesy Facebook

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 23 (UPI) -- Social media giant Facebook inflated average video viewing times from its platform by up to 80 percent in the past two years, the company and other sources said.

Facebook boosted the figures by counting a video as viewed if it had been seen for more than 3 seconds when calculating its "average duration of video viewed" metric, which makes it seem like viewers were watching videos for much longer.

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The miscalculation may have caused marketers to misjudge the performance of its video advertising over the past two years. Facebook said it has since corrected the way it calculates the video metrics.

"This error has been fixed, it did not impact billing, and we have notified our partners both through our product dashboards and via sales and publisher outreach," the company said. "We also renamed the metric to make it clearer what we measure. This metric is one of many our partners use to assess their video campaigns."

The company said the error had no impact on video statistics it had previously shared, including time spent watching video or the number of videos viewed.

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David Fischer, Facebook's vice president of business and marketing partnerships, said the company "reviewed our other video metrics on the dashboard and have found that this has no impact on video numbers we have hared in the past, such as time spent watching video or the number of video views."

"We want our clients to know that this miscalculation has not and will not going forward have an impact on billing or how media mix models value their Facebook video investments," he said.

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