Facebook vice president of business and marketing partnerships David Fischer responded to last week?s report that its data on average viewing time for videos over the past two years was flawed.
Suzanne Vranica and Jack Marshall of The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the social network disclosed the glitch in a post on its advertising help center several weeks ago, admitting that it only included video views of more than three seconds, which artificially inflated its data for average time watching videos, and Facebook said in a statement to the two reporters:
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. Fischer offered further clarity in a Facebook for Business post late last Friday:
About one month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard–average duration of video viewed. The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn?t: It reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of ?views? of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seco...