Facebook was artificially inflate viewing time of videos on the network – TVI24

The big advertisers and the marketeers activists are furious with Facebook after discovering that the largest social network in the world was to inflate the average time of viewing of the videos that are inserted in its platform in the last two years, reports the Wall Street Journal, which cites sources close to the process.

a few weeks Ago, Facebook released a post in your “help Centre for advertisers” in which it indicated that the metric used to calculate the average time that users spent watching each video was inflated because it only accounted for the views of videos of more than three seconds. The company also said that it was introducing a new metric to correct the problem.

we’ve Discovered, recently, a bug in the way calculated our metric in the videos", ” said Facebook in a statement.

The error has been corrected and does not impact on the billing. In addition notificámos our partners. Also redominámos the metric to make it clear what is measured. This metric is one of the many systems that our partners use to evaluate their video campaigns”, added to the social network.

But some of the advertisers, who were informed by Facebook about the change, they wanted to go further and eventually get some more information on the part of the technology.

The Publicis Media, the division of purchasing advertising space within the group, Publicis Groupe, will have been told, by Facebook, that the method of the previous count, clearly, inflacionava the average time of viewing, between 60% and 80%. A information that this company will have delivered to a customer in August, with whom the WSJ spoke.

The Publicis was responsible for the purchase of about eur 68.7 billion in ads on behalf of traders all over the world in 2015, according to estimates from research firm RECMA.

The news is an embarrassment for Facebook, which has touting the rapid growth in consumption of videos via its platform in the last few years.

Because of this error many traders may have misjudged the performance of the video advertising that you have purchased on Facebook in the last two years. And may also have been affected in their decisions about how much to spend on Facebook video vs. other areas of video ads, such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, and even television channels.

The companies media, and the publishers will also have been affected, once they have been transmitted inaccurate data on the consumption of their video content through the social network. Many use this information to determine the type of content they publish.