Demand for Third-Party Measurement Tools Grows Amid Facebook’s Two-Year Video Metric Errors

Facebook, while still a fresher face among social video platforms in comparison to YouTube and other long-established counterparts such as Dailymotion, created considerable interest when it expressed plans to share profits with content creators. This announcement initiated a surge in video viewing on the platform. According to reports in November last year, Facebook recorded up to 8 billion viewings per day – an astonishing 100% increase from the statistics in April of the same year. The measurement of these views introduced an important distinction: Facebook considered video viewing to be three seconds, whereas YouTube counted video views as 30 seconds. Despite this difference, advertisers continued to utilize Facebook’s video services, bolstering Facebook’s digital advertising market share to an impressive 12%, second only to Google, which controls approximately 31% of the market.

However, the reliability of Facebook’s video viewer number claims recently came into question. Last Friday, Facebook issued a quasi-apology for incorrectly calculating the average duration of video watch times on their platform. David Fischer, VP of Business and Marketing Partnerships at Facebook, addressed the issue, stating, “About a month ago, we discovered an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed.” He noted that the miscalculation created an inflation of these statistics but was quick to clarify that this error did not impact other key metrics such as the time spent watching videos or the total number of video views.

Despite Fischer’s reassurances, some stakeholders felt underwhelmed by this response given that the issue had occurred for a span of two years before being rectified. One disgruntled party, ad buying agency Publicis Media, shared with The Wall Street Journal that “this once again illuminates the absolute need to have 3rd party tagging and verification on Facebook’s platform. Two years of reporting inflated performance numbers is unacceptable”. Their frustration resonates with the reality that their analytics and data reports significantly influence the marketing decisions of their large client base. Competition is heated in digital advertising, where platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat (now Snap Inc.), YouTube, and Twitter are all vying for the same advertising revenue. On a global scale in 2015, Publicis was responsible for the procurement of approximately $77 billion in ads for their marketing clients.

Looking forward, it remains unclear what impact this error of inflated reporting will have on Facebook’s future revenue generation. Despite the incident, Facebook remains the largest single social network worldwide by user numbers, boasting 1.7 billion users, and one billion on Messenger and WhatsApp. Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012, contributes to this vast user base with more than 500 million users.