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This seems slightly overblown. I suspect this was a metric useful for engineering that found its way to external usage. That's because in many recommendation sy

by emcq 10y ago

This seems slightly overblown. I suspect this was a metric useful for engineering that found its way to external usage. That's because in many recommendation systems in practice you want to filter out the spurious views, and a simple way to do that is with dwell time. It's not uncommon to require at least 50% of pixels in view for 1 second before you have an impression for static images [0, 1]. AOL defines an impression requiring 2 seconds for images [1]. Facebook likely did some analyses to find that 3 seconds was a good cutoff for their site. There are more sophisticated ways to estimate dwell time but they seem uncommon in practice; perhaps due to their difficulty communicating to advertisers what the impression metric actually means. For sites with many bots or inbound marketing you often find users bounce quickly which drives some of this timing. I'm a bit surprised it needs to be that high for Facebook without many bots or users bouncing quickly. Perhaps this is for mobile users scrolling quickly. [0] http://advertising.aol.com/specs/terms/aol-viewability-terms http://advertising.aol.com/specs/terms/aol-viewability-terms [1] http://mediaratingcouncil.org/063014%20Viewable%20Ad%20Impression%20Guideline_Final.pdf http://mediaratingcouncil.org/063014%20Viewable%20Ad%20Impre...

ma2rten 10y ago
I thought that this metric is supposed to measure the quality of the views that the advertiser is paying for. In that case maybe advertisers shouldn't pay for views under 3 seconds, but if they do it should count towards the average.
- jdoliner 10y ago
  Based on the stat in the article about it resulting in 60% to 80% difference in total viewing time, I think they were probably reporting total views including views under 3 seconds and reporting avg view length discounting views under 3 seconds. This results in a pretty misleading viewing time. Still quite possibly a mistake, but I can see why advertisers would be pissed.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Isn't it the advertisers' job to measure the quality of the channel? Or does this kind of advertising have an intangible outcome like brand awareness?
  - teen 10y ago
    How do you measure video watched on their platform? You can't since they host the video.
    - aianus 10y ago
      You measure the change in your sales while the campaign is active. That's the only relevant metric anyways.
      - ethanbond 10y ago
        Which is affected by about a billion other metrics, like if it's sunny out. Attribution is the fundamental problem of advertising, and getting closer to solving it is Google and Facebook's value proposition. This indicates that they are not nearly as helpful in solving it as they have been claiming since they've been providing bad inputs for their customers to do analysis.
        aianus 10y ago
        In order for this to be a real issue, customers must be incapable of attributing sales to advertising campaigns but somehow capable of attributing them to seconds of video displayed. Doesn't make sense.
        ethanbond 10y ago
        Yes it does, because getting accurate numbers from Facebook is a key part to calculating either of those things. You definitely can't do it with certainty, but you would hope the entity you're paying to record the data necessary to get as close to possible would in fact be an accurate source of said data.
forgettableuser 10y ago
I don't think this is overblown. Considering that issues of money and trust are on the line, (and the inverse of trust which is fraud), and we are talking about a company that deals with over $17 billion a year in ad revenues, I'm surprised there isn't more scrutiny on this kind of thing in general.
- emcq 10y ago
  When an impression isnt made (say 50% in view for 1 second) then no one is getting billed. This is the standard practice for internet advertising. As far as I know Facebook does the same thing. I haven't read the Facebook advertising documentation in a long time but know that they outline many of their metrics in detail. People haven't been getting overcharged and it hasn't effected billing. From the article: "... 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." What are the implications of this? "Due to the miscalculated data, marketers may have misjudged the performance of video advertising they have purchased from Facebook over the past two years." The other part about making it difficult to compare against competitors is true regardless of having the same metric due to site and user differences. Maybe facebook users spend more on average than twitter users after clicking on your ad for an ecommerce site? A/B tests towards the goal you're interested in is much more fruitful from a business perspective then say comparing click thru rates.
  - ethanbond 10y ago
    Literally every form of fraud ever is detectable and preventable if the victim is willing to dedicate her life to dissecting every metric and cross-referencing with a billion other metrics. How is this an argument? They lied, and it induced people to give them money.
  - alkjshdkfjasdf 10y ago
    I currently spend $X,000 per day in advertising on facebook. Their reported clicks barely match up within an order of magnitude. I've spent 4 days investigating this, so it's worthwhile to share the data. For every 100 clicks I purchase, at a strong CPC ($0.10 - $2.00 CPC), I have found: - GA tells me i got between 40-60 sessions - piwik tells me ~70 - server logs show that page was requested ~400x (not indexed, a FB-only lander). I have IP and UA recorded, and both are rotated. My guess is that FB preloads the HTML LP when the impressions shows from mobile, so the browser is primed to quickly load assets (w/o sig resources to d/l images/etc -- just request the page that initially loads all that) My point is attribution for conversions and link clicks is hard. Any marketer worth their salt avoids the thought of "I paid for 10 clicks but GA only shows 6". A better marketer thinks, "I paid $660 to acquire 2 customers. Is that acceptable?"
partiallypro 10y ago
It's not overblown if you're lying to advertisers about the quality of impressions their ads received, and lying to investors about it too...especially when your stock has rocketed to making Facebook easily in the top 10 largest corporations in the world. Not only that but Facebook actively brags about video impressions in their conference calls. This is fraud. I think this is something that should be investigated by the SEC to be perfectly honest. Doesn't mean they should be charged, just investigated; because if they are misreporting this, what other metrics are they misreporting to shareholders?
- emcq 10y ago
  What specifically is the lie here? That they report average view time without trivial views? That seems like a more useful metric. You also can't really directly compare these simple metrics across sites as they don't get at customer lifetime value. With these simple metrics you run into problems where the average video view may be higher on site A, but the average spend for users is higher on site B, and simply following the metric will lead you to an ineffective campaign. Whose responsibility is it to effectively manage an advertising campaign? While I agree that more oversight and transparency is welcome here, I think jumping out and calling it fraud is exactly the kind of reaction that makes me feel this is overblown.
  - Bjartr 10y ago
    The one thing that would make it misleading is if they reported the average time excluding views under 3 seconds, but reported impressions including them. From the article it is not clear that this is the case
    - adevine 10y ago
      I think your comment is the key one. I actually don't see a problem at all with what they've reported IF they also separately excluded views under 3 seconds from their total count of views (i.e. the denominator). If they included them in view count, I would think a lawsuit would be warranted.
    - 10y ago
prostoalex 10y ago
2 seconds is also Google/DoubleClick's cut-off, they refer to it as IAB standard: "For in-stream video ads, 50% of the ad’s pixels must be visible in the browser window for a continuous 2 seconds." https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en
LordHumungous 10y ago
Yeah. The main purpose of the metric is to compare the relative effectiveness of ads. If each number was off by the same amount, that doesn't affect the delta
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  ... if there's only one advertiser you can buy placements from!! Or indeed if all advertisers are using the same misleading metric.
tmalsburg2 10y ago
It's perfectly fine to use the metric in question if its definition is clear. However, the definition was apparently not clear and Facebook therefore misled advertisers. Metrics are at the core of Facebook's business. If they don't get this right, that's fairly embarrassing, and raises a lot of questions about their other metrics. Perhaps this was not outright fraud but even if it was mere incompetence that's bad enough.

by emcq 10y ago

ma2rten 10y ago

I thought that this metric is supposed to measure the quality of the views that the advertiser is paying for. In that case maybe advertisers shouldn't pay for views under 3 seconds, but if they do it should count towards the average.

jdoliner 10y ago
Based on the stat in the article about it resulting in 60% to 80% difference in total viewing time, I think they were probably reporting total views including views under 3 seconds and reporting avg view length discounting views under 3 seconds. This results in a pretty misleading viewing time. Still quite possibly a mistake, but I can see why advertisers would be pissed.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
Isn't it the advertisers' job to measure the quality of the channel? Or does this kind of advertising have an intangible outcome like brand awareness?
- teen 10y ago
  How do you measure video watched on their platform? You can't since they host the video.
  - aianus 10y ago
    You measure the change in your sales while the campaign is active. That's the only relevant metric anyways.
    - ethanbond 10y ago
      Which is affected by about a billion other metrics, like if it's sunny out. Attribution is the fundamental problem of advertising, and getting closer to solving it is Google and Facebook's value proposition. This indicates that they are not nearly as helpful in solving it as they have been claiming since they've been providing bad inputs for their customers to do analysis.
      - aianus 10y ago
        In order for this to be a real issue, customers must be incapable of attributing sales to advertising campaigns but somehow capable of attributing them to seconds of video displayed. Doesn't make sense.
        ethanbond 10y ago
        Yes it does, because getting accurate numbers from Facebook is a key part to calculating either of those things. You definitely can't do it with certainty, but you would hope the entity you're paying to record the data necessary to get as close to possible would in fact be an accurate source of said data.

forgettableuser 10y ago

I don't think this is overblown. Considering that issues of money and trust are on the line, (and the inverse of trust which is fraud), and we are talking about a company that deals with over $17 billion a year in ad revenues, I'm surprised there isn't more scrutiny on this kind of thing in general.

emcq 10y ago
When an impression isnt made (say 50% in view for 1 second) then no one is getting billed. This is the standard practice for internet advertising. As far as I know Facebook does the same thing. I haven't read the Facebook advertising documentation in a long time but know that they outline many of their metrics in detail. People haven't been getting overcharged and it hasn't effected billing. From the article: "... 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." What are the implications of this? "Due to the miscalculated data, marketers may have misjudged the performance of video advertising they have purchased from Facebook over the past two years." The other part about making it difficult to compare against competitors is true regardless of having the same metric due to site and user differences. Maybe facebook users spend more on average than twitter users after clicking on your ad for an ecommerce site? A/B tests towards the goal you're interested in is much more fruitful from a business perspective then say comparing click thru rates.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  Literally every form of fraud ever is detectable and preventable if the victim is willing to dedicate her life to dissecting every metric and cross-referencing with a billion other metrics. How is this an argument? They lied, and it induced people to give them money.
- alkjshdkfjasdf 10y ago
  I currently spend $X,000 per day in advertising on facebook. Their reported clicks barely match up within an order of magnitude. I've spent 4 days investigating this, so it's worthwhile to share the data. For every 100 clicks I purchase, at a strong CPC ($0.10 - $2.00 CPC), I have found: - GA tells me i got between 40-60 sessions - piwik tells me ~70 - server logs show that page was requested ~400x (not indexed, a FB-only lander). I have IP and UA recorded, and both are rotated. My guess is that FB preloads the HTML LP when the impressions shows from mobile, so the browser is primed to quickly load assets (w/o sig resources to d/l images/etc -- just request the page that initially loads all that) My point is attribution for conversions and link clicks is hard. Any marketer worth their salt avoids the thought of "I paid for 10 clicks but GA only shows 6". A better marketer thinks, "I paid $660 to acquire 2 customers. Is that acceptable?"

partiallypro 10y ago

It's not overblown if you're lying to advertisers about the quality of impressions their ads received, and lying to investors about it too...especially when your stock has rocketed to making Facebook easily in the top 10 largest corporations in the world. Not only that but Facebook actively brags about video impressions in their conference calls. This is fraud. I think this is something that should be investigated by the SEC to be perfectly honest. Doesn't mean they should be charged, just investigated; because if they are misreporting this, what other metrics are they misreporting to shareholders?

emcq 10y ago
What specifically is the lie here? That they report average view time without trivial views? That seems like a more useful metric. You also can't really directly compare these simple metrics across sites as they don't get at customer lifetime value. With these simple metrics you run into problems where the average video view may be higher on site A, but the average spend for users is higher on site B, and simply following the metric will lead you to an ineffective campaign. Whose responsibility is it to effectively manage an advertising campaign? While I agree that more oversight and transparency is welcome here, I think jumping out and calling it fraud is exactly the kind of reaction that makes me feel this is overblown.
- Bjartr 10y ago
  The one thing that would make it misleading is if they reported the average time excluding views under 3 seconds, but reported impressions including them. From the article it is not clear that this is the case
  - adevine 10y ago
    I think your comment is the key one. I actually don't see a problem at all with what they've reported IF they also separately excluded views under 3 seconds from their total count of views (i.e. the denominator). If they included them in view count, I would think a lawsuit would be warranted.
  - 10y ago

prostoalex 10y ago

2 seconds is also Google/DoubleClick's cut-off, they refer to it as IAB standard: "For in-stream video ads, 50% of the ad’s pixels must be visible in the browser window for a continuous 2 seconds." https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en

LordHumungous 10y ago

Yeah. The main purpose of the metric is to compare the relative effectiveness of ads. If each number was off by the same amount, that doesn't affect the delta

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
... if there's only one advertiser you can buy placements from!! Or indeed if all advertisers are using the same misleading metric.

tmalsburg2 10y ago

It's perfectly fine to use the metric in question if its definition is clear. However, the definition was apparently not clear and Facebook therefore misled advertisers. Metrics are at the core of Facebook's business. If they don't get this right, that's fairly embarrassing, and raises a lot of questions about their other metrics. Perhaps this was not outright fraud but even if it was mere incompetence that's bad enough.