Dramatised video viewing metrics provided to advertisers by Facebook

CALIFORNIA, U.S. - In a shocking move that has left the industry gaping, Facebook is said to have overemphasised a key metric used by advertisers to compute the standing of their videos. 

The exaggeration was carried on for more than two years and ranged up to 80 percent, a report in The Wall Street Journal claimed.
Facebook acknowledged this by arguing that it had mistakenly presented average video view time on its platform. 

According to reports, Publicis Media, one of the ad buyers was “upset” by this fallacy.

The metric was over exaggerated because it only noted down views of more than three seconds and completely disregarded shorter views, the company stated several weeks ago in a post on its advertiser help center web page.

In recent years, particularly on live, Facebook has been placing great prominence on its videos. 

In the month of March, Facebook gave all its users the ability to live stream, all its users i.e. 1.7 billion people.

After the addition of this service, Facebook Live has been used to investigate crucial events, including the shootings of Philando Castile and five Dallas police officers in July. That very month, Mark Zuckerberg stated, "We see a world that's video-first."

Steps are being taken to correct this misconception, claimed Facebook.

In a statement, the social media giant said, "We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our 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. 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.”

Facebook carries on with its reputation as a black box that doesn’t give away its inner working logistics to the people who provide Facebook its daily bread.

CEO of the world's biggest advertising group WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell had called out Facebook several times on its “ludicrous” 3-second video viewability threshold.

On Thursday, he told Business Insider, "That's why we invested in comScore and built a media measurement business in over 50 countries around the world. 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. The referee and player cannot be the same person."

Share value of Facebook has dropped from $178 to $128.30 or by 1.3 percent after the report surfaced.