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"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube

"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" - Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q This is neither a bug nor a "mistake". It's straight up fraud. Fraud because Facebook uses these false #s to prove to their advertizing clients that they are getting a HUGE ROI, when they really aren't. Also the investors and analysts bump up their ratings and the stock goes higher and higher on false ad view #s. By counting a view as a legitmate view after the video plays only for 3 seconds, their "algorithm" counted billions of views even when the user has not even seen it, because Auto-play is enabled by default and you have to opt-out / disable it and no-one does it. It takes a person roughly 4 seconds to scroll off their feed as they quickly "scan" their friends posts.

yladiz 10y ago
Do you have a citation for the "4 seconds" figure? If it is 4 seconds, and it logs a view after 3 seconds, that's pretty damning.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  That it logs invisible videos at all would be a problem.
- sean_patel 10y ago
  It's not publicly discussed for obvious reasons, but I worked closely with Mudd for a couple of months last year. Here's a related interview where he touches upon it. http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-finds-that-fast-scrolling-millennials-consume-ads-2-5-times-faster/ http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-fi... Facebook spend an awful lot of resources tracking all sorts of user behaviour inside it's "walled garden". I got really sick of it after a while and decided to stop working for them (even as a contractor)
hanspeter 10y ago
ROI from FB ads can only be calculated from tracking conversions on the advertiser's site or in their app. View count alone can never be attributed a ROI as there is no measurable return. If you pay solely for video views on Facebook or Youtube without any tracking, you're not being a smart advertiser and it doesn't really matter if view counts are more or less correct - you're blindly throwing your money away. If you do however track your ROI correctly it doesn't really matter how many true view counts you get.
- le205 10y ago
  The main problem here is attribution - and with many ad platforms pushing the 'viewthrough conversion' metric, it becomes very messy when hundreds of millions of users start getting tagged as having 'viewed' a video too easily. Future purchases can then be tied back to that 'view', even if it was insignificant in the buying process. This is where as an advertiser I would be very interested in the distribution of view lengths, to better understand the user's engagement and likelihood that the video made any impact on their behaviours at all. Although being totally honest, you can't rule out the impact of even a passive 3 second peripheral glimpse of brand video content. Most traditional advertising - TV and outdoor, for example - is not actively viewed, but rather passively 'seen'. Ultimately it comes back to being pragmatic in the way you assess advertising effectiveness - the promise of digital is perfect ROI analysis and measurement, but the reality is far trickier.
qmalzp 10y ago
Your video is about how FB is viewed as lying to content creators because it counts a view as having the video play for 3 seconds, which content creators believe is too small a threshold. The article here is about how the average view length is only calculated from exactly those impressions which lasted more than 3 seconds, where the outrage is that it should have been computed for all impressions. In other words, that the threshold was too high.

yladiz 10y ago

Do you have a citation for the "4 seconds" figure? If it is 4 seconds, and it logs a view after 3 seconds, that's pretty damning.

AstralStorm 10y ago
That it logs invisible videos at all would be a problem.
sean_patel 10y ago
It's not publicly discussed for obvious reasons, but I worked closely with Mudd for a couple of months last year. Here's a related interview where he touches upon it. http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-finds-that-fast-scrolling-millennials-consume-ads-2-5-times-faster/ http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-fi... Facebook spend an awful lot of resources tracking all sorts of user behaviour inside it's "walled garden". I got really sick of it after a while and decided to stop working for them (even as a contractor)

hanspeter 10y ago

ROI from FB ads can only be calculated from tracking conversions on the advertiser's site or in their app. View count alone can never be attributed a ROI as there is no measurable return. If you pay solely for video views on Facebook or Youtube without any tracking, you're not being a smart advertiser and it doesn't really matter if view counts are more or less correct - you're blindly throwing your money away. If you do however track your ROI correctly it doesn't really matter how many true view counts you get.

le205 10y ago
The main problem here is attribution - and with many ad platforms pushing the 'viewthrough conversion' metric, it becomes very messy when hundreds of millions of users start getting tagged as having 'viewed' a video too easily. Future purchases can then be tied back to that 'view', even if it was insignificant in the buying process. This is where as an advertiser I would be very interested in the distribution of view lengths, to better understand the user's engagement and likelihood that the video made any impact on their behaviours at all. Although being totally honest, you can't rule out the impact of even a passive 3 second peripheral glimpse of brand video content. Most traditional advertising - TV and outdoor, for example - is not actively viewed, but rather passively 'seen'. Ultimately it comes back to being pragmatic in the way you assess advertising effectiveness - the promise of digital is perfect ROI analysis and measurement, but the reality is far trickier.

qmalzp 10y ago

Your video is about how FB is viewed as lying to content creators because it counts a view as having the video play for 3 seconds, which content creators believe is too small a threshold. The article here is about how the average view length is only calculated from exactly those impressions which lasted more than 3 seconds, where the outrage is that it should have been computed for all impressions. In other words, that the threshold was too high.