Facebook ‘overestimated video viewing metric for two years’

According to a story on the Wall Street Journal, the social media platform disclosed that its metric for the average time users spent watching videos was artificially inflated as it was only counting video views of more than three seconds. It is reportedly introducing a new metric — average watch time — to fix the issue by reflecting video views of any duration.

The story went on to say that the average time spent watching videos could have been overestimated by between 60% and 80%. 

A statement from Facebook read: “We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our video metrics. 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.”