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Here’s the executive summary: - Facebook tries to get more ad dollars by saying they are a platform with high engagement (aka: comments and “likes”) - A journ
by joshspankit 5y ago
Here’s the executive summary:
- Facebook tries to get more ad dollars by saying they are a platform with high engagement (aka: comments and “likes”)
- A journalist using FB’s own tools found that the posts with the highest engagement were right-wing
- Facebook then created an entire report to say “Nono: it’s views that are important, and look at all this nice stuff people view”
- Facebook tries to avoid mentioning that they themselves directly control what gets put on people’s news feed and when, which means they can simply say “Show 100mil people this cat picture” and then an hour later say “Look! 100mil people looked at a cat picture! That makes it popular and shows that people like to look at cat pictures on FB!”
Further evidence: Ever notice that video views on FB are way higher than on other platforms? That’s because every time someone scrolled past a video in their newsfeed it counted as a view, no matter how fast that scroll was. This was likely used to try and entice video creators who equated views with revenue.
- jacquesm 5y agoFB is a study in dark patterns.
- janto 5y agobut isn't views also what you want when you're showing ads? I mean clicking on the ad would be preferable I guess, but I'm not sure how tightly correlated that is to users clicking on user generated content. I can see Facebook wanting to sell views rather than clicks to their customers.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago>That’s because every time someone scrolled past a video in their newsfeed it counted as a view, no matter how fast that scroll was. This was likely used to try and entice video creators who equated views with revenue. At least in the ads space, a view was counted as three seconds watching a video. It's pretty bad (and much video is unmeasurable, anyway) but it's not as bad as you're making out.
- joshspankit 5y agoI’m more talking about user-generated content (non-ads). Do those have the same rules for what counts as a view? Is the 3 seconds counting the pre-load as the video is just coming in to frame? I suspect it does.