Comments
Bah
IMHO, this viral story is being blown out of proportion. If there was a transparency issue (which I'm not entirely sure there was), okay, that's noteworthy, at least -- but the failure (declination, really) in properly accounting for video views of less than 3 seconds isn't really a failure in my book. I think it is sensible policy. (I can't tell you the number of times I have, without intending to and without any interest, viewed 1-2 seconds of a video in my Facebook news feed -- and, accordingly, counting those inadvertent viewings would be counterproductive for Facebook.)
Adi
9/26/2016 10:45:36 AM
User Rank Author
Re: Bah
@Joe - I don't think the issue is that the <3 sec videos are particularly important, it's more about comparing FB views with other providers. Other video providers also have videos abandoned at very early stages -- but count them towards their average viewing metrics, and bring their averages down. Certainly Publicis and WPP, who are huge ad networks and spend Billions with FB, were pretty miffed about this. And they're a lot more knowledgeable than either of us and have a lot more at stake.
It's also hard to call it "sensible policy" - that tends to be a conscious decision, not something you do in error and find out two years afterwards.
But I agree, that's not really the problem. The real problem is that FB runs it's own measurement. If I'm spending millions with a media company that won't let an objective third-party track its numbers, they had at least better get it right. Nor is this an error lost in complexity - they got their divisor wrong. That's school-level math, for a company that has built its value to advertisers on highly advanced personalization based on complex algorithms. If you were spending millions with them, I suspect you too would be concerned about the quality of the data you based your investment on.
JohnBarnes
9/27/2016 8:05:18 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
Adi,
Speaking up for modern metrics: what's needed here is not the "grade school math" of including everything in the average, but the "grad school math" of letting the data tell you what metric works.
A less-than-three-second view is a different thing than a twenty-minute view, clearly; a second or two that comes down the pipe while the visitor is switching away from having been rickrolled or having clicked the wrong icon is different from the second or two of someone deciding "No, Katie Perry still stinks" but may not be measurable; and catching five seconds of a video that is 35 seconds, consisting of 7 repeats of a cat falling nto a wastebasket, is probably more of a "watch" than listening to the first song on a compilation.
Much of that information could be captured from data YouTube is already accumulating, and packaged in a way that allowed much better pricing for advertising (better meaning a much sharper picture of exactly how much of what kind of attention they would be getting from what kind of viewer). But that will mean both YouTube and its customers will have to move away from the obvious/intuitive stats. This whole hubbub strikes me as people insisting they'd rather have a number with a simple interpretation than one that tells them anything.
Re: Bah
@John: You've hit the nail on the head, of course (as you are wont to do). It's a lot easier for overpaid marketing execs to throw some numbers together for vanity metrics than it is to actually calculate and project ROI.
freehe
9/29/2016 9:40:32 AM
User Rank Platinum
Facebook's bad math
I am not surprised the Facebook inflated their metrics. I suspect most companies do the same because they are focused on profit and wanting to stay ahead of the competition even if it means doing committing acts that are unethical or illegal.
I am curious to see the metrics if videos did not play automatically on Facebook.
JohnBarnes
9/29/2016 2:22:50 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Facebook's bad math
Freehe,
Metrics should reflect what the decision makers want to know. One reason for placing ads with Facebook is that videos do play automatically there. (Of course counting auto plays separately from deliberate plays would be even better -- but for that matter, radio advertisers would love to know how often you actually want to listen and how often you just weren't paying attention and left it off.
dlr5288
9/30/2016 11:48:48 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Facebook's bad math
Good points, I agree!
I think Facebook is just trying to stay ahead of the game and rihtfully so wants the profits owed to them. As a user it doesn't really bother me, but as someone who might be more invested in Facebook I can understand the concern.
JohnBarnes
9/27/2016 8:06:50 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
Oh, also wanted to concur strongly with Adi's view that FB running its own measurement and assessment system is the bigger and more real problem.
freehe
9/29/2016 9:41:09 AM
User Rank Platinum
Facebook's Bath Math Raises
Sounds like the industry needs standards for calculating metrics, where is ANSI, IEEE?
JohnBarnes
9/29/2016 2:32:33 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Facebook's Bath Math Raises
Freehe,
I'm not sure who would care about or benefit from there being any standard metrics. Advertisers making a big enough buy always ask for -- and can get--the raw data that they then process according to their actual specific needs. And the app providers do the same for themselves. Other than making illegal collusion easier, and giving journalists very simple stories to write, who would benefit?
freehe
9/29/2016 9:39:00 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
@adi, good points.
Re: Bah
@Adi: This discussion inspired me to put my thoughts into more in-depth words here (link).
As for FB running its own measurement, they'd been pretty upfront about how they were defining things since 2014. If Publicis et al. couldn't figure out that Facebook's definition of "video views" applied to metrics involving, er, video views, then -- iMHO -- they and their clients got what they deserved.
dcawrey
9/26/2016 11:04:35 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
Ads on videos from YouTube and Facebook are a tough business. I have a hard time understanding the long-term viability of those platforms monetizing video. People don't really pay attention to the ads on YouTube, and in Facebook's case they don't even show them (yet).
Michelle
9/27/2016 1:05:33 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
I think it would be nice if view counting methods were the same on all networks. That's a dream that'll probably never come true for most advertiser, but I bet it would be nice to have.
Re: Bah
@Michelle: And if I had wheels I'd be a wagon. ;)
This goes to Scott Adams's theory of the "confusopoly" that he espoused in The Dilbert Future some years ago. Confusopolies are forms of oligopolies where there is enough business for everyone so long as the companies involved confuse their customers and demographics enough on differentiating factors to the point that customers are unable to understand, know, or appreciate that the competing companies' products or services are essentially the same.
Michelle
9/28/2016 9:03:26 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
@Joe I haven't read Adams' take on such things. This is no surprise to me at all. I had assumed something like this was afoot. Why choose a standard of measurement when you don't really need it to keep your customers.
Re: Bah
@Michelle: Indeed. Examples Adams used were airlines, colas, and (now I'm really dating myself) AT&T and MCI. The products and services are all *essentially* the same, more or less...so it comes down to confusing customers. Otherwise, they would become commodities. Confusopolies prevent race-to-the-bottom pricing.
Michelle
10/16/2016 5:14:08 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
@Joe ahh yes, AT&T and MCI -- I remember those days. It's amazing how products & services continue to differentiate themselves without any really differentiators...
Re: Bah
@Michelle: It's really all in the marketing.
Case in point: A brilliant marketer I know had to market a residential area that was not exactly in a prime location. She turned it around and *made* it a prime location by focusing the brand messaging on how close it was to all of the prime locations it was near -- allowing people to enjoy the best of all worlds.
Michelle
10/20/2016 2:13:27 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
@Joe sounds like it was a successful campaign! It's fun teaching kids today about the different tactics marketers use to sway the audience. It's a lot like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.
faryl
9/29/2016 9:41:32 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
I agree.
As a publicly traded company, Facebook should be getting audited on its revenue streams, meaning there either is transparency on the various monetary metrics & the way they are calculated, or else their auditors (and internal auditors) aren't doing their jobs. :-/
elizabethv
9/29/2016 10:26:37 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
@faryl - Publicly traded or not, I don't see anyone caring as much about Facebook inflating their numbers as they do Wells Fargo opening phoney accounts to inflate their numbers.... At the end of the day, I don't and have never, paid a dime to Facebook.
faryl
9/30/2016 1:41:17 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
As a user, I don't care; but I can see where advertisers might.
It's more complex from a stock-holder point of view ...After everything that happened with Enron, laws were passed so publicly-traded companies have to adhere to strict guidelines with respect to any processes that could impact revenue/profit and they get audited on them annually. Part of that would include how different metrics are measured/calculated.
(I'm not sure how Wells Fargo was able to get away with that! Crazy!)
Re: Bah
Agreed. Despite us caring, there could be many that would care for several obvious reasons.
Re: Bah
I would like to note the distinction between the two though. The intensity of the issue with Wells Fargo is much more. And there is goin to be impact to all aspects for the company due to what happened.
Re: Bah
@elizabethv: Except, contrary to what the WSJ and Publicis would have you believe, there was no inflation. Facebook told everyone how it was defining "video views" back in 2014, in very clear terms. Publicis and a bunch of others were just too dumb to realize what it meant.
JohnBarnes
9/30/2016 7:46:58 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
faryl,
Really? And should there be audits of the internal metrics Safeway uses to decide how much produce of each kind to commit to? (They do that many months in advance, it affects the whole economy, and it's done based on a huge data stream from the info they capture from those little discount cards.) There are even people who will argue that food is more important than online advertising.
Advertising buyers really do their own metrics and at least the competent ones don't trust everything that advertising sellers tell them. The upset about Facebook's metric seems to me to be mostly a complaint from the bleachers, not from the players.
elizabethv
9/30/2016 10:08:11 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
My guess would be that betting on Facebook is a pretty sure bet. As best I can tell, advertising is a lot of guesswork, but you know your advertisement is going to see millions of eyes if you put it on Facebook, no matter what the math looks like on their videos. At best it doesn't give an accurate view of the true success of videos being played. How that changes anything is beyond me.
JohnBarnes
9/30/2016 10:35:20 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
ElizabethV,
Because marketing is also very much about targeting -- making sure the right eyes are seeing your ads at the right times. That's why TV shows with huge audiences of people who don't buy enough stuff (aka geezers like me) get cancelled all the time; the numbers are okay but the targeting stinks.
Online, linger time over a video is a very good proxy for how much attention it's actually getting, and when that is synced/compared with demographics, you have an idea of the actual value of the eyes on it.
It's just that there are so many ways of figuring that, depending on exactly what you are trying to do, that I can't see any sort of standardization coming into it. Every path is different every time.
Re: Bah
Just to add to what you summarized, perspective also plays an important role. That chnages a lot in terms how you read , hear or understand.
Re: Bah
It is a guess work with some planned strategy. What would work and what wouldn't isn't something that you can control.
faryl
10/31/2016 7:35:42 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Bah
My guess is that if there is an industry standard to mitigate the risks of spoilage due to unsold food, there's an audit process in place to make sure the controls around those risks are working! Lol!
Re: Bah
Yep, Audit is the big thing.
clrmoney
9/26/2016 10:44:43 AM
User Rank Platinum
Facebook Problems
Facebook is a billlion dollar online social medial platform used to chat and post pisctures etc. so this about them with this video data metric analysis I don't get because they should have been taken care of all of this so they can get more user to come cna check out the video and more revenue for them when someone views them.
elizabethv
9/27/2016 6:33:00 PM
User Rank Platinum
So.....
So my thought with this is, does it then also include just when a video is running, and doesn't necessarily mean anyone is watching it? Because on my Facebook feed, most videos start playing automatically once I scroll and certain percentage of the video screen is visible on my overall screen. I can look at the post above and below more often than not and still see that the video is playing while I am doing so. I'm not really watching the video that's playing. If that's the case, those numbers are going to be extremely skewed, because by myself alone, I'm sure my number of video watching is just about astronomical and I'm not typically watching the videos.
JohnBarnes
9/28/2016 7:48:15 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: So.....
ElizabethV,
Not only that, if you use any of the various mix features in many different music video sites, you only pick the first song; after that you're finding out what the algorithm thinks you ought to like. And the algorithm, of course, is driven by the data accumulated by millions of passive algorithm-followers just like you.
Eventually we will all perish by starving to death in a collective earworm, unable to leave our chairs because it's already played the Llama Llama song fifty times and we have to hear it again.
freehe
9/29/2016 9:40:14 AM
User Rank Platinum
Facebook's bad math
I am not surprised the Facebook inflated their metrics. I suspect most companies do the same because they are focused on profit and wanting to stay ahead of the competition even if it means doing committing acts that are unethical or illegal.
I am curious to see the metrics if videos did not play automatically on Facebook.
elizabethv
9/29/2016 10:25:04 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: Facebook's bad math
@freehe - Exactly! The videos play whether you're watching or not (though I've noticed that feature seems to be slowing down some, not all videos play automatically anymore. I wonder if this number played into the number that posters could see of how many people actually viewed their videos. Were those legitimate views, or just auto plays that most weren't even paying attention to?
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