Facebook is growing rapidly in the video department, which is why the company is doing whatever it takes to convince advertisers to take advantage of what it has to offer. Facebook is so determined to do this that it failed to realize its video numbers were off.
The company has been sharing with advertisers the average amount of time users spend watching videos. With YouTube being the most popular spot on the web for watching videos, Facebook knows it has a difficult time ahead. However, something went wrong because not too long ago, the company came out saying the numbers it gave to advertisers were inflated.
How did this happen?
Facebook Video Traffic Discrepancy
According to a report from Facebook itself, the company boosted the numbers by counting a video as viewed when the user only watched the content for 3 seconds. Folks watching videos for 3 seconds have no use to advertisers, so it's quite interesting why Facebook would inflate numbers in such a manner.
The social networking company says it is taking the necessary steps to fix the problem. Furthermore, advertisers were not overcharged during the time this issue was active.
"As soon as we discovered the discrepancy, we fixed it. We informed our partners and made sure to put a notice in the product itself so that anyone who went into their dashboard could understand our error," says David Fischer, Facebook's vice president of business.
"We have also reviewed our other video metrics on the dashboard and have found that this has no impact on video numbers we have shared in the past, such as time spent watching video or the number of video views."
This disclosure is a huge deal: it could hurt Facebook in its bid to gain enough advertisers who would take its video platform seriously. This is technically not Facebook defrauding advertisers, but it is misleading and no doubt some advertisers will take issue with this.
It would be interesting to see how advertisers react and whether Facebook could win back their trust.
But Money Will Continue To Flow Into The Facebook Platform
While the Palo Alto company is busy working on its video platform to gain more advertiser support, it is also using its livestream capabilities to bring the Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump debate to its users via a deal with ABC News.
Perhaps in the hope of further wooing marketers onto the Facebook platform, the company updated as well its Messenger service to support more than 30,000 bots. This update should make it possible for users to send and receive online payments directly from Messenger.
It would appear as if Facebook is moving in the direction to create an internet within the internet and monetizing on every service — from video to Messenger — in the process.
