WHOOPS

Facebook Overestimated Video Metric

For average viewing time of video ads for two years.

Ad buyers are incensed with Facebook after discovering that the company overestimated the average viewing time of video advertisements on the platform for two years. Facebook said that its metric was artificially inflated because it only factored in video views of more than three seconds. Ad buying agency Publicis Media was told that the company overestimated by 60-80 percent. “We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our video metrics,” Facebook said in a statement. “This error has been fixed, it did not impact billing, and we have notified our partners both through our product dashboards and via sales and publisher outreach. We also renamed the metric to make it clearer what we measure. This metric is one of many our partners use to assess their video campaigns.”