Complete Story
02/16/2017
Facebook's inflated metrics shake the foundations of digital advertising
Imagine, if you would, that you work for a company that sells bananas.
Each month your boss gives you targets for selling bananas. In the last month he sets you the target of selling 100 cases of bananas. But you only sell six. What do you do? If you come clean he will fire you for being rubbish at selling bananas. That is your job after all.
Imagine, if you would, that you work for a company that sells bananas.
Each month your boss gives you targets for selling bananas. In the last month he sets you the target of selling 100 cases of bananas. But you only sell six. What do you do? If you come clean he will fire you for being rubbish at selling bananas. That is your job after all.
But here’s the thing. The boss never checks to see how many cases of bananas you actually sold. So, you know, you could just tell him you sold a bit more than you actually did.
What would Mark Zuckerberg do? Hard to say, but we now know what Facebook in Australia would do. They would say they sold 100 cases of bananas. And they would collect their salary and do the same thing next month too.
The only problem would come when someone who does not work for you starts to count how many boxes of bananas you sold.
In October 2016, following a host of stories about how Facebook have been marking their own homework, ratings company Nielsen altered how they count a video “view” on Facebook. According to Facebook, if you watch a video for more than three seconds on the platform, that counts as a “view.” But Facebook didn’t count anyone who didn’t watch or watched for less than three seconds, massively inflating average viewing time.
Nielsen started counting everyone. Australian video streams dropped by 94 percent over the course of a single month.
Nielsen measured total Facebook streams of 8.6bn in July 2016, 12.5bn in August and 9.9bn in September. But in the three months after changing the measurement method, numbers plummeted to 560m in October and November and 580m in December.
