Facebook inflated metrics of videos to advertisers for two years – CNET in Spanish

Facebook inflated their metrics to advertisers for two years.

Jaap Arriens, NurPhoto via Getty Images

Facebook has been to overestimate the average time it told the advertisers that the users spent watching their videos on the platform during the last two years, something that may possibly affect the expense of marketing in the ads.

The metric is inflated artificially and it only had the videos that had been viewed for three seconds or more, without taking into account those who did not arrive to that time, as revealed on the company’s own a few weeks ago in a publication of your Web page in the help center.

The calculation error probably gave an overestimate of the viewing time of between 60 and 80 percent, according to a letter sent to an advertising agency that bought ads on the platform, reportedThe Wall Street Journal.

Since it is well known that Facebook has been putting a lot of emphasis on the video in the last few years, being one of his last actions to allow that any user had access to the broadcast of videos, with the ability to reach 1,700 million people who use the service.

Facebook Live has served for large emissions and also to some that have remained as a brand and that will be remembered, as the shooting death of Philando Castilla and five police officers of Dallas in July. Mark Zuckerberg has reiterated on several occasions that “we see a world in which the video is in the first place.”

Facebook said that it had taken measures to correct the problem.

“we have Recently discovered an error in the way in which we calculate our metrics of video,” said the company in a press release. “This error has been corrected, and it had no impact on the billing and we’ve already notified our members both through the panel and through the dissemination editorial. We’ve also changed the name of the metric, to make it more clear how we measure it. This metric is one of many that our partners use to evaluate their video campaigns”.

After the Journal to report the error, the actions of Facebook on Wall Street fell 1.3 percent.