17 ms·

Did Facebook’s faulty data push publishers to make terrible decisions on video?

207 points by laurex 8y ago

rossdavidh 8y ago
The moral of the story: if what the "person/organization who ought to know about these things" is telling you doesn't make sense or doesn't match with your own experience, consider the possibility that they might be just plain wrong. Especially if it would be wrong in a way that makes them look better.
- brd 8y ago
  Absolutely this. We're actively building a system to better monitor effectiveness of social content and it's amazing hearing the relief from people when they're seeing numbers for the first time that look like actual KPIs versus platforms spewing out self serving vanity metrics. FB and much of the current social marketing scene in general have been handing off best practices that feel highly questionable at best.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  You're glossing over the bigger problem. The "person/organization who ought to know about these things" not only has possession of all the data about user behavior on their platforms, they also control the means by which content producers access users. You're understating the monopolistic power that Facebook's network effects have produced in the online content space. It's only recently that third party analytics companies came into the space with an incentive and enough data to make meaningful market-wide forecasts.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gcbw2 8y ago
    The excuse for all the trackers involved in online advertising is exactly because not a single advertiser trust any publisher. Your comment is still very valid for small clients on self-serve systems, though.
- ianai 8y ago
  What about the equally important take away that you can trust Facebook to lie at any chance it suits them?
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    Oh, I think that was already clear before this. :)
    - ianai 8y ago
      The upvotes say people found it noteworthy.
  - omegaworks 8y ago
    I'm curious why Facebook chose to share the wrong metrics. What was the intent?
    - mic47 8y ago
      "why Facebook chose to share the wrong metrics" Why did you choose to include that bug into your code? Srsly, people don't choose to make mistakes (but sometimes they choose to do cover up). Also, there is no such things as "Facebook". Facebook didn't choose, someone inside Facebook either make mistake, or deliberate decision. "Facebook" is not single entity with single agenda and plan, but complex company, with different people optimizing for different things (i.e. security/privacy and growth and ads). There is shared high-level vision, but not every decision is made at single place.
      - omegaworks 8y ago
        State a falsehood with the intent to deceive is implied by "lie." I'm curious what intent people are ascribing to this action. You say it was a mistake, at the same time you give many reasons why it likely wasn't a mistake: many people vet the public-facing communications of such a large company.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
- village-idiot 8y ago
  I think the other lesson is to be wary of sales pitches being sold as an expert recommendation.
netaustin 8y ago
It's simplistic to lay publishing's woes so squarely at the feet of Facebook's video stats. This was contributing factor, certainly, but the executives who pivoted to video weren't abandoning 7% margins on text in search of 15% margins — if they were, they'd likely have left the text operation intact and built video atop a successful business. Editorial operations were already struggling! In some cases, the promise of video may have spurred additional investment in publishers that wouldn't have been able to get it with just text. While video is more expensive to produce, the CPMs are also higher, which creates a bigger cashflow. It seems likely that this was a factor in Buzzfeed's NBCUniversal rounds.
- netaustin 8y ago
  In other words, everyone had the same bad data: The investors, the marketers, and the publishers all thought video was a winner.
  - _jal 8y ago
    ...Everyone except Facebook, who was making money, and sat on the data for a year.
    - prostoalex 8y ago
      Don’t ad buyers have internal mechanisms to track conversion rates and revenue uplift independent of what the publisher tells them? Facebook was hardly the first player in the video game, with YouTube, Hulu and a few other big brands relying on this model exclusively.
      - IggleSniggle 8y ago
        Keep in mind that buyers are everyone from Big Corp down to Mom n Pop. The smaller the shop, the more you must rely on the metrics you are told. And even small places may value awareness and/or indirect conversion. In fact, a local, interest based ad may be totally focused on awareness, hoping to increase the chance that you walk into the store the next time you drive by.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
Weren't people spending more time on video on Facebook due to Facebook prioritizing video and pages turning still images into videos of still images? Anyone else know what I'm referring to here? You see an image someone shared, but it's a video, so you click it, and it's still a still image, because page admins were trying to game the system.
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  What? Really? I don’t use FB but sounds like something anyone would do to game the system
  - RandomInteger4 8y ago
    Yerp. Here are a few links regarding the issue: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-post-short-videos-of-still-images-on-Facebook-instead-of-just-an-image https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-post-short-videos-of-sti... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebook-cracks-down-static-images-video-and-fake-video-play-buttons-new-algorithm https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebook-cr...
    - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
      thanks, people always trying to outsmart others...
cimi_ 8y ago
From the linked FB post (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...): > This error should not stand in the way of our ultimate goal, which is to do what’s in the best interest of our partners and their business growth.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Hooo wait, I thought it was about connecting the world!
arcticfox 8y ago
> “The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.” This opinion is hard to swallow. This is not . at . all true. If the "information" you're trying to convey is colors and bokeh, sure...
- chki 8y ago
  Does he actually believe this? It sounds like a marketing fluff piece that some intern had to make up. I mean the guy is Facebook VP for Europe and probably knows very well that business reports (for example) are not digested "in a quicker way" if you make a 3 hour video out of them.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    Apparently "information" is a euphemism for "attention".
  - disgruntledphd2 8y ago
    Nicola Mendelsohn is a she. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Mendelsohn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Mendelsohn
    - chki 8y ago
      Oh, thanks for clearing that up! Although the name can be either female or male (and is probably even more likely to be female) and the article doesn't indicate the gender I just assumed that it was a guy. I guess it shows that my perception on the industry is still very much influenced by stereotypes; no matter how much I would like to think that I'm immune to that.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  Reading is way quicker than watching a video. Speech is just too slow. If an informational video doesn’t have a transcript or a way of speeding it up I’m not interested. At work we have a subscription to Lynda.com and while the content is okay, the only way the videos are bearable is to watch them at 2x speed.
cimi_ 8y ago
From the the linked post in the article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...): > Ad buying agency Publicis Media was told by Facebook that the earlier counting method likely overestimated average time spent watching videos by between 60% and 80%, according to a late August letter Publicis Media sent to clients that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the FB post (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...): > The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video [...]. How does this work?
- halflings 8y ago
  They explain that a "view" is when the user watches the video for more than 3 seconds. View time is probably highly heavily skewed towards plays that last less than 3 seconds. (also because facebook autoplays videos without any pause time) If 60% of viewers play the video for 0-3 seconds, and only 40% view the rest of the video, you're grossly overstation the average view time. Removing users with less than 3 seconds seems 100% intentional (to avoid exposing the fact that most viewers are not really viewers, they immediately dismiss the video), not an error.
  - cimi_ 8y ago
    Thanks, this makes sense. If you think of this in terms of distraction, it's huge.
  - dirkgently 8y ago
    Right on. In other words, fb measures were correct for "people watching videos for 3 seconds or more". But they didn't: 1. Qualify their numbers with that. 2. Disclose how many people were NOT watching videos. Without these two critical details, the numbers represented "all Facebook users".
    - 8y ago
paulpauper 8y ago
This seems like that lawsuit against Google adsenes while back. the settlement, if any, will be very low and will go mostly to lawyers. like google, Facebook is very, very good at winning its cases and paying very little otherwise.
malvosenior 8y ago
> What does seem clear now is that Facebook’s executives’ statements about video should not have been a factor in news publishers’ decisions to lay off their editorial staffs. But it’s hard not to conclude that publishers heard that rhapsodizing about the future and assumed that Facebook knew better than they did, that Facebook’s data must be more accurate than their own data was, that Facebook was perceiving something that they could not. That their own eyes were wrong. If you're making massive, sweeping changes to the structure of your business and product offering based on Facebook PR, you deserve to go out of business. What FB said could have even been true and these organizations could have staffed up on all video only to later become victims of an algorithm change or some arbitrary FB rule in the future.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
If the ads are in any way related to conversions, the data comes home to roost very, very quickly. Ad spends are measured and results are tracked. The value of those ads is a function of how far the needle is moved. It's only when the needle can only be loosely measured can this go awry. For example, in a brand awareness campaign, it's sometimes hard to measure effect. If FB was reporting '80% viewed' when it was '20%' then it's basically fraud. What some guy says at a conference about 'the future of ads' is almost irrelevant, people are saying things all the time, and even if companies were to allocated more budget there ... they should see the results for themselves and adjust.
- robryan 8y ago
  Yeah, time viewed is really only a vanity metric that only someone building a campaign with no direct result at all would look at. The kind of big business campaign just blowing money on branding is probably getting an even worse return on TV.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Time viewed is not a vanity metric for a brand awareness campaign (fyi those a 'real things'), or even an indirect campaign say for a movie launch where a 3 second view is not the same as a 25 second view. If you're launching a big film like Avengers, a 25 second view is a like a 'soft lead' and you can correlate that to how many tickets you're going to sell. Brand awareness is much more intangible, but they are in the end real things. But yes, the softer metrics are massively abused by agencies, and in-house marketing teams trying to justify spend, hires etc.. Weirdly, so much of the 'conversion' stuff is utter crap, like ads for 'photos of Jet Fighters' or 'actresses with and without makeup' where they jam 40 ads on the screen each time. It's this kind of crap that really ruins the internet.
- traek 8y ago
  Brand awareness campaigns are measured (and billed) by impressions, not by "average length of video viewed," which was the metric that Facebook lied about.
harry8 8y ago
Did internet ad fraud con advertisers? Direct clicks and conversions are such lowest common denominator crap. Suitable for ponzi schemes and snake oil sales. Tesla advertises amazingly well online. Their conversion rate is clearly zero. Not close to zero, not "they don't care" It is zero, nothing, not one single conversion. Across the breadth range of companies built on advertising from coca cola to chanel as far as I can see they don't use internet ads. These companies have not gone away. Google, Facebook, ebay etc etc all have poster ads in my town. I guess targeted internet ads didn't work for their purposes.
- seem_2211 8y ago
  There's a distinction that needs to be made between brand advertising and performance advertising. Brand advertising is most of what we've had in the past (most TV ads excluding infomercials, most Newspaper ads - not including classifieds of course). Why is a Rolex "worth" $10-20k? Why is an Apple product priced at 2x the price of an equivalent? In large, because they spend millions every year advertising their brand - with no measurable conversion mechanism. In my opinion, this is why online advertising is so obnoxious - it's mostly low effort performance advertising which tends to be much less enjoyable from an aesthetic level.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  What you are describing isn’t a con. A coke billboard fills a different purpose than a coupon or a transactional online ad. What is a con is telling advertisers that I watched something for 5 minutes, when in fact I watched for 5 seconds. Imagine if you were an advertiser who paid for a product placement in videos. Your campaign was a total waste of time.
- traek 8y ago
  > Across the breadth range of companies built on advertising from coca cola to chanel as far as I can see they don't use internet ads. "Coca-Cola has just hired its first chief digital marketing officer" (2016) https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/12/12/coca-cola-has-just-hired-its-first-chief-digital-marketing-officer-and-here-s-why https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/12/12/coca-cola-has-just-h... "Chanel has been investing in other areas of digital, boasting more display and video ad impressions in the past year than almost any other brand in the study." https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/chanel-flaunts-digital-finesse https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/chanel-flaunts-digital-...
dylan604 8y ago
I’ve been in and around the commercial spot industry for most of my employable life. I’ve seen the rise & fall of production work due to the lower cost to entry to professional quality gear and the bottom falling out in ‘08. TV ad sales have never gone away though. The production budgets fell, but not the ad buys. There now exists video productions solely for online, and it will never see TV. From my conversations with these agencies, online ad click through rates are still a drop in the bucket from their TV presence. How they justify this I don’t know, and I know that’s supposed to be a huge selling point of online advertising. Does that mean video is more effective than text?? Depends on your agency I guess, or maybe depends on the campaign.
- akiselev 8y ago
  How is the ROI or whatever the TV equivalent of click through rates measured for TV commercials? Is the measurement different between ads that focus on selling something vs those that focus on maintaining brand awareness (like Coca Cola and the big car makers)?
  - dylan604 8y ago
    That's what I've never understood. I'm in the camera department, so I'm just concerned with with acquiring the picture. I've chatted with some of the ad peeps on set, but they are mainly concerned with getting the spot produced. I've never properly chatted with the analytics folks. I'm assuming in the old days, it was Nielsen ratings. Today, I'd assume your digital cable box is providing all of the analytics ever needed. Still don't know how comparing eyeballs viewing an ad translates to people spending dollars in a store. I have had direct conversations with small market clients. The client hired a new agency, and that agency hired us to shoot the spots. The agency came up with a decent small market campaign. The next time it came time to shoot the next series of spots, the client mentioned the spike in business from the ads after they started airing. Yes, the agency also had radio and online campaign, but it was the TV ads that resulted in the spike in calls. ROI must be pretty good. In a single day shoot, we can shoot 6 spots for this client. They then air 1 spot per month. I'd imagine the smaller market clients can see a significant ROI vs mega-clients shooting brand awareness campaigns. If you've ever seen Mad Men and how they put agencies on annual retainers, then you'll get what I mean. The Madison Avenue crowd probably have tons of research, but that's so far out of my circles of interest.
underwater 8y ago
> “All the while, Facebook continued to reap the benefits from the inflated numbers” I don’t see how Facebook benefited from the data being wrong. Facebook wins by having publishers to produce formats and content that users actually want to see.
- justinclift 8y ago
  Facebook was launching it's own competing news thing wasn't it? eg clearing away some of the potential competitors
degenerate 8y ago
Nobody is mentioning video ads. I would gladly consume more video on my phone if there wasn't an adroll. I can use adblock on my computer, but it's more difficult on the phone (DNS66, etc) so less likely I will have adblocking on the phone. As publishers moved more to video to capitalize on video plays, so did ads come with them, thus video became less appealing for me. That's how it played out for me the past 2 years, and probably you too.
- gcbw2 8y ago
  Why is it more difficult on a phone? it is exactly the same process as a desktop. First install a decent browser (not the crap one shipped by the OEM), for example, firefox for Android. Then install your favorite adblocker extensions (which should be uBlock Origin). Done. No step 3!
gcbw2 8y ago
How is this different from Volkswagen? They inflated a metric by 600+% according to the legal documents on the article, for 2+ years. And kept all the revenue from the 'mistake' while crushing competitors that lost business for those two years.
- philipps 8y ago
  I’m not sure if you are suggesting FB should face similar consequences as VW or that FB’s conduct is excusable because others do similar things. Some differences are that VW plead guilty and paid a 2.8B $ fine, the CEO resigned, executives have been facing criminal charges, and a slew of international cases are still outstanding. Another difference is that VW’s deceit had direct human health consequences.
justinclift 8y ago
So Facebook repeatedly gives publishers incorrect info, and some of those publishers go broke. Meanwhile, Facebook is getting it's own (news) publishing operation off the ground. Which could probably do with having less competitors. That could be viewed in a rather specific light. "Operating in Bad Faith" might be the nicest way to put it? ;)
natch 8y ago
This reads like a carefully disguised defend, deflect, and dilute piece crafted against the publishers on belhalf of Facebook. Are we sure it is not paid for by Facebook or some entity aligned with Facebook?
reilly3000 8y ago
It wasn't just Facebook metrics that made people jump on the video bandwagon. The whole video ad stack from player to ad server to header bidding wrapper to bandwidth is full of ways to spend 4-6 figures per month on fixed overhead and variable cost to run a player at scale, let alone production. Most pubs have been financially burned on video by an industry that can't quite understand why it isn't working. All the while, marketers continue to have the largest and most impactful influence ever with TV. I know why it isn't working: human hands are made for interacting with things. While sitting in front of a TV, we humans tend to believe what we're told, and we're typically prone, not on guard. Who wants to hold an ad in their hands? Who doesn't feel burned when a video ad interrupts their flow of their digital (fingeratively) pleasure trail? Now imagine what kind of influence can be had over another when they are in a fully immersive digital (binary) experience. Its like handing over your entire limbic system to the machine. Malevolent influence at scale is remarkably accepted by humans, it is our past. I hope our future moves towards respecting the sovereignty of individual human consciousness. Laws, attitudes, and behaviors need to change. We all who have been Branded have had a piece of our identity conformed to serve the ambition of another. I think the average American brain walking through the grocery store is analogous to a chairlift pole covered in stickers, a wall covered in layers of gum. Any exactly how do you clean away an Impression? I'm a recovering internet marketer. I've felt lousy for a long time for having been so cavalier with influence. I've been trying to see what better looks like for a long time. What do you think better looks like? Feels like?
- buboard 8y ago
  I believe people are just applying whatever worked on TV blindly, but on the TV you are buying a part of the flow, while on the web you are buying an interruption to the flow which should discount its cost right out the door. And while there are many ways with which text ads can fit in a document layout, there is not many ways to lay out an ad in a video. I find the product placements that many youtubers do is more appealing, and a better way to promote a brand rather than "this ad will close in 20 seconds"
luckycharms810 8y ago
This truly feels like an article that doesn’t understand the landscape of digital advertising. It is naive to believe that publishers are taking queues from Facebook on how to publish their content. All publishers ( including Facebook ) take their content queues based on what advertisers want. This is their source of revenue, and the only way to move the bottom line as a publisher. Video advertising is far more lucrative than banners. In order to create a consistent user experience, you cannot have video ads alongside static content. While the miscalculation is certain metrics might have made Facebooks inventory look a little better, it 100% did not have an industry changing influence as indicated here.
kermittd 8y ago
I knew it! But seriously I’ve heard about this “ trend” for years but anecdotally most people I know don’t consume random videos on social networks. Vids from friends? That seems to be a different story.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
I have unlimited 4G data but I never watch videos. For one I don't want sound blaring out of my phone. Second I can actually read faster than your video. Information density. Our ancestors invented the script for a reason and its not going anywhere.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  For videos to work, I would assume that you'd need the audio to play as well, in most cases anyway. The thing is, I don't know anyone who doesn't mute their phone (or computer) all the time, and old un-mute when they really want to watch, and hear, a video. It's certainly Facebooks fault for giving out wrong statistics, but I also feel like the advertising industry have failed to do extremely basic research.
  - ryukafalz 8y ago
    I don't. I keep the ringer volume muted, but the media volume turned up - this usually serves me pretty well. ...until I hit an autoplaying video somewhere, but I usually just learn to avoid sites that do that.
  - lfowles 8y ago
    Most Facebook videos have captions burned in at this point.
- esrauch 8y ago
  > Our ancestors invented the script for a reason Despite agreeing with the conclusion, I don't really think this is a reasonable statement. Our ancestors domesticated horses for a reason, that doesn't mean new technologies that weren't available then can't entirely supplant that need.
csomar 8y ago
> In one, Facebook had inflated Average Duration of Video Viewed from 2.0 seconds to 17.5 seconds (an increase of 775%); in the other, Facebook had inflated Average Duration of Video Viewed from 2.4 seconds to 17.3 seconds (an increase of 621%). How does Facebook measure the success of video viewership? From my experience, Facebook forces you to view the whole ad. This contrasts with YouTube: You are forced to watch for a few seconds and can opt-out later. This gives an important signal: The viewer was not interested and thus bailed out. He didn't watch the whole video. This can't happen in Facebook: You are forced to watch the whole video-ad if you want to carry on watching your original video. Another complaint: Auto-Play. If I'm watching a video, Facebook will auto-jump to another video in a ridiculously short-amount of time. There is not opt-out of this behavior. You are forced to watch the next video; and potentially the next ad. Again, this contrasts with YouTube: Auto-Play is opt-in. The time before the player jumps to the next video is significantly longer. The time before the player jump in Facebook is so short that I almost always fail to prevent it. So dark-patterned Facebook these days. It is really annoying, scary and unfriendly.
daodedickinson 8y ago
>“The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.” How bad of a reading disorder do you have to have to think you can extract information more efficiently from video than text?
xtiansimon 8y ago
This sound bite from WNYC Marketplace [1] reminded me of how shakey creative industry has always been. "Who cares how long people watch videos on facebook? News organizations...thinking video was where the ad money was." [...] Ben Bradford (reporting). [...] Just months after he was hired, Gonzales was let go [as a video producer for Mic]. Gabe. And we started seeing the same happen everywere. Any you know I think at that point you realize the jig is up, right? [1]: [Marketplace Business: A look back at the "pivot to video" after a new lawsuit alleges Facebook misled about video viewership](https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/18/economy/facebook-pivot-video-news-journalism-jobs-advertisers https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/18/economy/facebook-pivo...)

207 points by laurex 8y ago

The moral of the story: if what the "person/organization who ought to know about these things" is telling you doesn't make sense or doesn't match with your own experience, consider the possibility that they might be just plain wrong. Especially if it would be wrong in a way that makes them look better.

brd 8y ago
Absolutely this. We're actively building a system to better monitor effectiveness of social content and it's amazing hearing the relief from people when they're seeing numbers for the first time that look like actual KPIs versus platforms spewing out self serving vanity metrics. FB and much of the current social marketing scene in general have been handing off best practices that feel highly questionable at best.
omegaworks 8y ago
You're glossing over the bigger problem. The "person/organization who ought to know about these things" not only has possession of all the data about user behavior on their platforms, they also control the means by which content producers access users. You're understating the monopolistic power that Facebook's network effects have produced in the online content space. It's only recently that third party analytics companies came into the space with an incentive and enough data to make meaningful market-wide forecasts.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gcbw2 8y ago
  The excuse for all the trackers involved in online advertising is exactly because not a single advertiser trust any publisher. Your comment is still very valid for small clients on self-serve systems, though.
ianai 8y ago
What about the equally important take away that you can trust Facebook to lie at any chance it suits them?
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  Oh, I think that was already clear before this. :)
  - ianai 8y ago
    The upvotes say people found it noteworthy.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  I'm curious why Facebook chose to share the wrong metrics. What was the intent?
  - mic47 8y ago
    "why Facebook chose to share the wrong metrics" Why did you choose to include that bug into your code? Srsly, people don't choose to make mistakes (but sometimes they choose to do cover up). Also, there is no such things as "Facebook". Facebook didn't choose, someone inside Facebook either make mistake, or deliberate decision. "Facebook" is not single entity with single agenda and plan, but complex company, with different people optimizing for different things (i.e. security/privacy and growth and ads). There is shared high-level vision, but not every decision is made at single place.
    - omegaworks 8y ago
      State a falsehood with the intent to deceive is implied by "lie." I'm curious what intent people are ascribing to this action. You say it was a mistake, at the same time you give many reasons why it likely wasn't a mistake: many people vet the public-facing communications of such a large company.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
village-idiot 8y ago
I think the other lesson is to be wary of sales pitches being sold as an expert recommendation.

netaustin 8y ago

It's simplistic to lay publishing's woes so squarely at the feet of Facebook's video stats. This was contributing factor, certainly, but the executives who pivoted to video weren't abandoning 7% margins on text in search of 15% margins — if they were, they'd likely have left the text operation intact and built video atop a successful business. Editorial operations were already struggling! In some cases, the promise of video may have spurred additional investment in publishers that wouldn't have been able to get it with just text. While video is more expensive to produce, the CPMs are also higher, which creates a bigger cashflow. It seems likely that this was a factor in Buzzfeed's NBCUniversal rounds.

netaustin 8y ago
In other words, everyone had the same bad data: The investors, the marketers, and the publishers all thought video was a winner.
- _jal 8y ago
  ...Everyone except Facebook, who was making money, and sat on the data for a year.
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    Don’t ad buyers have internal mechanisms to track conversion rates and revenue uplift independent of what the publisher tells them? Facebook was hardly the first player in the video game, with YouTube, Hulu and a few other big brands relying on this model exclusively.
    - IggleSniggle 8y ago
      Keep in mind that buyers are everyone from Big Corp down to Mom n Pop. The smaller the shop, the more you must rely on the metrics you are told. And even small places may value awareness and/or indirect conversion. In fact, a local, interest based ad may be totally focused on awareness, hoping to increase the chance that you walk into the store the next time you drive by.

RandomInteger4 8y ago

Weren't people spending more time on video on Facebook due to Facebook prioritizing video and pages turning still images into videos of still images? Anyone else know what I'm referring to here? You see an image someone shared, but it's a video, so you click it, and it's still a still image, because page admins were trying to game the system.

Ibethewalrus 8y ago
What? Really? I don’t use FB but sounds like something anyone would do to game the system
- RandomInteger4 8y ago
  Yerp. Here are a few links regarding the issue: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-post-short-videos-of-still-images-on-Facebook-instead-of-just-an-image https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-post-short-videos-of-sti... https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebook-cracks-down-static-images-video-and-fake-video-play-buttons-new-algorithm https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/facebook-cr...
  - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
    thanks, people always trying to outsmart others...

cimi_ 8y ago

From the linked FB post (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...): > This error should not stand in the way of our ultimate goal, which is to do what’s in the best interest of our partners and their business growth.

ahartmetz 8y ago
Hooo wait, I thought it was about connecting the world!

arcticfox 8y ago

> “The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.” This opinion is hard to swallow. This is not . at . all true. If the "information" you're trying to convey is colors and bokeh, sure...

chki 8y ago
Does he actually believe this? It sounds like a marketing fluff piece that some intern had to make up. I mean the guy is Facebook VP for Europe and probably knows very well that business reports (for example) are not digested "in a quicker way" if you make a 3 hour video out of them.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Apparently "information" is a euphemism for "attention".
- disgruntledphd2 8y ago
  Nicola Mendelsohn is a she. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Mendelsohn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Mendelsohn
  - chki 8y ago
    Oh, thanks for clearing that up! Although the name can be either female or male (and is probably even more likely to be female) and the article doesn't indicate the gender I just assumed that it was a guy. I guess it shows that my perception on the industry is still very much influenced by stereotypes; no matter how much I would like to think that I'm immune to that.
mattkevan 8y ago
Reading is way quicker than watching a video. Speech is just too slow. If an informational video doesn’t have a transcript or a way of speeding it up I’m not interested. At work we have a subscription to Lynda.com and while the content is okay, the only way the videos are bearable is to watch them at 2x speed.

cimi_ 8y ago

From the the linked post in the article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...): > Ad buying agency Publicis Media was told by Facebook that the earlier counting method likely overestimated average time spent watching videos by between 60% and 80%, according to a late August letter Publicis Media sent to clients that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the FB post (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metrics-update https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-video-metric...): > The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video [...]. How does this work?

halflings 8y ago
They explain that a "view" is when the user watches the video for more than 3 seconds. View time is probably highly heavily skewed towards plays that last less than 3 seconds. (also because facebook autoplays videos without any pause time) If 60% of viewers play the video for 0-3 seconds, and only 40% view the rest of the video, you're grossly overstation the average view time. Removing users with less than 3 seconds seems 100% intentional (to avoid exposing the fact that most viewers are not really viewers, they immediately dismiss the video), not an error.
- cimi_ 8y ago
  Thanks, this makes sense. If you think of this in terms of distraction, it's huge.
- dirkgently 8y ago
  Right on. In other words, fb measures were correct for "people watching videos for 3 seconds or more". But they didn't: 1. Qualify their numbers with that. 2. Disclose how many people were NOT watching videos. Without these two critical details, the numbers represented "all Facebook users".
  - 8y ago

paulpauper 8y ago

This seems like that lawsuit against Google adsenes while back. the settlement, if any, will be very low and will go mostly to lawyers. like google, Facebook is very, very good at winning its cases and paying very little otherwise.

malvosenior 8y ago

> What does seem clear now is that Facebook’s executives’ statements about video should not have been a factor in news publishers’ decisions to lay off their editorial staffs. But it’s hard not to conclude that publishers heard that rhapsodizing about the future and assumed that Facebook knew better than they did, that Facebook’s data must be more accurate than their own data was, that Facebook was perceiving something that they could not. That their own eyes were wrong. If you're making massive, sweeping changes to the structure of your business and product offering based on Facebook PR, you deserve to go out of business. What FB said could have even been true and these organizations could have staffed up on all video only to later become victims of an algorithm change or some arbitrary FB rule in the future.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

If the ads are in any way related to conversions, the data comes home to roost very, very quickly. Ad spends are measured and results are tracked. The value of those ads is a function of how far the needle is moved. It's only when the needle can only be loosely measured can this go awry. For example, in a brand awareness campaign, it's sometimes hard to measure effect. If FB was reporting '80% viewed' when it was '20%' then it's basically fraud. What some guy says at a conference about 'the future of ads' is almost irrelevant, people are saying things all the time, and even if companies were to allocated more budget there ... they should see the results for themselves and adjust.

robryan 8y ago
Yeah, time viewed is really only a vanity metric that only someone building a campaign with no direct result at all would look at. The kind of big business campaign just blowing money on branding is probably getting an even worse return on TV.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Time viewed is not a vanity metric for a brand awareness campaign (fyi those a 'real things'), or even an indirect campaign say for a movie launch where a 3 second view is not the same as a 25 second view. If you're launching a big film like Avengers, a 25 second view is a like a 'soft lead' and you can correlate that to how many tickets you're going to sell. Brand awareness is much more intangible, but they are in the end real things. But yes, the softer metrics are massively abused by agencies, and in-house marketing teams trying to justify spend, hires etc.. Weirdly, so much of the 'conversion' stuff is utter crap, like ads for 'photos of Jet Fighters' or 'actresses with and without makeup' where they jam 40 ads on the screen each time. It's this kind of crap that really ruins the internet.
traek 8y ago
Brand awareness campaigns are measured (and billed) by impressions, not by "average length of video viewed," which was the metric that Facebook lied about.

harry8 8y ago

Did internet ad fraud con advertisers? Direct clicks and conversions are such lowest common denominator crap. Suitable for ponzi schemes and snake oil sales. Tesla advertises amazingly well online. Their conversion rate is clearly zero. Not close to zero, not "they don't care" It is zero, nothing, not one single conversion. Across the breadth range of companies built on advertising from coca cola to chanel as far as I can see they don't use internet ads. These companies have not gone away. Google, Facebook, ebay etc etc all have poster ads in my town. I guess targeted internet ads didn't work for their purposes.

seem_2211 8y ago
There's a distinction that needs to be made between brand advertising and performance advertising. Brand advertising is most of what we've had in the past (most TV ads excluding infomercials, most Newspaper ads - not including classifieds of course). Why is a Rolex "worth" $10-20k? Why is an Apple product priced at 2x the price of an equivalent? In large, because they spend millions every year advertising their brand - with no measurable conversion mechanism. In my opinion, this is why online advertising is so obnoxious - it's mostly low effort performance advertising which tends to be much less enjoyable from an aesthetic level.
Spooky23 8y ago
What you are describing isn’t a con. A coke billboard fills a different purpose than a coupon or a transactional online ad. What is a con is telling advertisers that I watched something for 5 minutes, when in fact I watched for 5 seconds. Imagine if you were an advertiser who paid for a product placement in videos. Your campaign was a total waste of time.
traek 8y ago
> Across the breadth range of companies built on advertising from coca cola to chanel as far as I can see they don't use internet ads. "Coca-Cola has just hired its first chief digital marketing officer" (2016) https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/12/12/coca-cola-has-just-hired-its-first-chief-digital-marketing-officer-and-here-s-why https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/12/12/coca-cola-has-just-h... "Chanel has been investing in other areas of digital, boasting more display and video ad impressions in the past year than almost any other brand in the study." https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/chanel-flaunts-digital-finesse https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/chanel-flaunts-digital-...

dylan604 8y ago

I’ve been in and around the commercial spot industry for most of my employable life. I’ve seen the rise & fall of production work due to the lower cost to entry to professional quality gear and the bottom falling out in ‘08. TV ad sales have never gone away though. The production budgets fell, but not the ad buys. There now exists video productions solely for online, and it will never see TV. From my conversations with these agencies, online ad click through rates are still a drop in the bucket from their TV presence. How they justify this I don’t know, and I know that’s supposed to be a huge selling point of online advertising. Does that mean video is more effective than text?? Depends on your agency I guess, or maybe depends on the campaign.

akiselev 8y ago
How is the ROI or whatever the TV equivalent of click through rates measured for TV commercials? Is the measurement different between ads that focus on selling something vs those that focus on maintaining brand awareness (like Coca Cola and the big car makers)?
- dylan604 8y ago
  That's what I've never understood. I'm in the camera department, so I'm just concerned with with acquiring the picture. I've chatted with some of the ad peeps on set, but they are mainly concerned with getting the spot produced. I've never properly chatted with the analytics folks. I'm assuming in the old days, it was Nielsen ratings. Today, I'd assume your digital cable box is providing all of the analytics ever needed. Still don't know how comparing eyeballs viewing an ad translates to people spending dollars in a store. I have had direct conversations with small market clients. The client hired a new agency, and that agency hired us to shoot the spots. The agency came up with a decent small market campaign. The next time it came time to shoot the next series of spots, the client mentioned the spike in business from the ads after they started airing. Yes, the agency also had radio and online campaign, but it was the TV ads that resulted in the spike in calls. ROI must be pretty good. In a single day shoot, we can shoot 6 spots for this client. They then air 1 spot per month. I'd imagine the smaller market clients can see a significant ROI vs mega-clients shooting brand awareness campaigns. If you've ever seen Mad Men and how they put agencies on annual retainers, then you'll get what I mean. The Madison Avenue crowd probably have tons of research, but that's so far out of my circles of interest.

underwater 8y ago

> “All the while, Facebook continued to reap the benefits from the inflated numbers” I don’t see how Facebook benefited from the data being wrong. Facebook wins by having publishers to produce formats and content that users actually want to see.

justinclift 8y ago
Facebook was launching it's own competing news thing wasn't it? eg clearing away some of the potential competitors

degenerate 8y ago

Nobody is mentioning video ads. I would gladly consume more video on my phone if there wasn't an adroll. I can use adblock on my computer, but it's more difficult on the phone (DNS66, etc) so less likely I will have adblocking on the phone. As publishers moved more to video to capitalize on video plays, so did ads come with them, thus video became less appealing for me. That's how it played out for me the past 2 years, and probably you too.

gcbw2 8y ago
Why is it more difficult on a phone? it is exactly the same process as a desktop. First install a decent browser (not the crap one shipped by the OEM), for example, firefox for Android. Then install your favorite adblocker extensions (which should be uBlock Origin). Done. No step 3!

gcbw2 8y ago

How is this different from Volkswagen? They inflated a metric by 600+% according to the legal documents on the article, for 2+ years. And kept all the revenue from the 'mistake' while crushing competitors that lost business for those two years.

philipps 8y ago
I’m not sure if you are suggesting FB should face similar consequences as VW or that FB’s conduct is excusable because others do similar things. Some differences are that VW plead guilty and paid a 2.8B $ fine, the CEO resigned, executives have been facing criminal charges, and a slew of international cases are still outstanding. Another difference is that VW’s deceit had direct human health consequences.

justinclift 8y ago

So Facebook repeatedly gives publishers incorrect info, and some of those publishers go broke. Meanwhile, Facebook is getting it's own (news) publishing operation off the ground. Which could probably do with having less competitors. That could be viewed in a rather specific light. "Operating in Bad Faith" might be the nicest way to put it? ;)

natch 8y ago

This reads like a carefully disguised defend, deflect, and dilute piece crafted against the publishers on belhalf of Facebook. Are we sure it is not paid for by Facebook or some entity aligned with Facebook?

reilly3000 8y ago

It wasn't just Facebook metrics that made people jump on the video bandwagon. The whole video ad stack from player to ad server to header bidding wrapper to bandwidth is full of ways to spend 4-6 figures per month on fixed overhead and variable cost to run a player at scale, let alone production. Most pubs have been financially burned on video by an industry that can't quite understand why it isn't working. All the while, marketers continue to have the largest and most impactful influence ever with TV. I know why it isn't working: human hands are made for interacting with things. While sitting in front of a TV, we humans tend to believe what we're told, and we're typically prone, not on guard. Who wants to hold an ad in their hands? Who doesn't feel burned when a video ad interrupts their flow of their digital (fingeratively) pleasure trail? Now imagine what kind of influence can be had over another when they are in a fully immersive digital (binary) experience. Its like handing over your entire limbic system to the machine. Malevolent influence at scale is remarkably accepted by humans, it is our past. I hope our future moves towards respecting the sovereignty of individual human consciousness. Laws, attitudes, and behaviors need to change. We all who have been Branded have had a piece of our identity conformed to serve the ambition of another. I think the average American brain walking through the grocery store is analogous to a chairlift pole covered in stickers, a wall covered in layers of gum. Any exactly how do you clean away an Impression? I'm a recovering internet marketer. I've felt lousy for a long time for having been so cavalier with influence. I've been trying to see what better looks like for a long time. What do you think better looks like? Feels like?

buboard 8y ago
I believe people are just applying whatever worked on TV blindly, but on the TV you are buying a part of the flow, while on the web you are buying an interruption to the flow which should discount its cost right out the door. And while there are many ways with which text ads can fit in a document layout, there is not many ways to lay out an ad in a video. I find the product placements that many youtubers do is more appealing, and a better way to promote a brand rather than "this ad will close in 20 seconds"

luckycharms810 8y ago

This truly feels like an article that doesn’t understand the landscape of digital advertising. It is naive to believe that publishers are taking queues from Facebook on how to publish their content. All publishers ( including Facebook ) take their content queues based on what advertisers want. This is their source of revenue, and the only way to move the bottom line as a publisher. Video advertising is far more lucrative than banners. In order to create a consistent user experience, you cannot have video ads alongside static content. While the miscalculation is certain metrics might have made Facebooks inventory look a little better, it 100% did not have an industry changing influence as indicated here.

kermittd 8y ago

I knew it! But seriously I’ve heard about this “ trend” for years but anecdotally most people I know don’t consume random videos on social networks. Vids from friends? That seems to be a different story.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

I have unlimited 4G data but I never watch videos. For one I don't want sound blaring out of my phone. Second I can actually read faster than your video. Information density. Our ancestors invented the script for a reason and its not going anywhere.

mrweasel 8y ago
For videos to work, I would assume that you'd need the audio to play as well, in most cases anyway. The thing is, I don't know anyone who doesn't mute their phone (or computer) all the time, and old un-mute when they really want to watch, and hear, a video. It's certainly Facebooks fault for giving out wrong statistics, but I also feel like the advertising industry have failed to do extremely basic research.
- ryukafalz 8y ago
  I don't. I keep the ringer volume muted, but the media volume turned up - this usually serves me pretty well. ...until I hit an autoplaying video somewhere, but I usually just learn to avoid sites that do that.
- lfowles 8y ago
  Most Facebook videos have captions burned in at this point.
esrauch 8y ago
> Our ancestors invented the script for a reason Despite agreeing with the conclusion, I don't really think this is a reasonable statement. Our ancestors domesticated horses for a reason, that doesn't mean new technologies that weren't available then can't entirely supplant that need.

csomar 8y ago

> In one, Facebook had inflated Average Duration of Video Viewed from 2.0 seconds to 17.5 seconds (an increase of 775%); in the other, Facebook had inflated Average Duration of Video Viewed from 2.4 seconds to 17.3 seconds (an increase of 621%). How does Facebook measure the success of video viewership? From my experience, Facebook forces you to view the whole ad. This contrasts with YouTube: You are forced to watch for a few seconds and can opt-out later. This gives an important signal: The viewer was not interested and thus bailed out. He didn't watch the whole video. This can't happen in Facebook: You are forced to watch the whole video-ad if you want to carry on watching your original video. Another complaint: Auto-Play. If I'm watching a video, Facebook will auto-jump to another video in a ridiculously short-amount of time. There is not opt-out of this behavior. You are forced to watch the next video; and potentially the next ad. Again, this contrasts with YouTube: Auto-Play is opt-in. The time before the player jumps to the next video is significantly longer. The time before the player jump in Facebook is so short that I almost always fail to prevent it. So dark-patterned Facebook these days. It is really annoying, scary and unfriendly.

daodedickinson 8y ago

>“The best way to tell stories, in this world where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn continued. “It commands so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually, the trend helps us to digest more of the information, in a quicker way.” How bad of a reading disorder do you have to have to think you can extract information more efficiently from video than text?

xtiansimon 8y ago

This sound bite from WNYC Marketplace [1] reminded me of how shakey creative industry has always been. "Who cares how long people watch videos on facebook? News organizations...thinking video was where the ad money was." [...] Ben Bradford (reporting). [...] Just months after he was hired, Gonzales was let go [as a video producer for Mic]. Gabe. And we started seeing the same happen everywere. Any you know I think at that point you realize the jig is up, right? [1]: [Marketplace Business: A look back at the "pivot to video" after a new lawsuit alleges Facebook misled about video viewership](https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/18/economy/facebook-pivot-video-news-journalism-jobs-advertisers https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/18/economy/facebook-pivo...)