Are Facebook’s Bad Metrics to Blame for ‘Pivot to Video’? Publishers Disagree

The allegations have rankled many in the media industry who watched as publishing companies shifted resources away from traditional text and toward shareable videos based, in part, on hopes they would perform well on Facebook and eventually pay off financially. The so-called pivot to video proved ruinous for some publishers that emphasized underwhelming video at the expense of their own website audiences.

“If they would’ve known that their video was being watched on a significantly shorter duration than it actually was, would they have been less likely to aggressively shift resources into Facebook video?” asked Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that advocates for publishers.

Fox Sports, Mic Networks Inc. and Mashable were among the group of digital publishers that laid off writers to make room for video producers. Each was seeking to accelerate its digital advertising growth and tap into higher engagement for video content on social media. Fox Sports owner

21st Century Fox
Inc.

and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

Fox Sports didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Mic’s decision to build out a premium video journalism newsroom in 2016 was a result of growing digital video consumption, which has only accelerated across all platforms including social, mobile, web and streaming. It did not have to do with Facebook’s average watch-time metrics,” a Mic spokeswoman said.

Jessica Coen, editor-in-chief of Mashable, said “Facebook is one of our valued partners. We’re always open to exploring additional paths for distribution. It’s not a zero sum game.”

The debate played out on Twitter on Wednesday, with journalists from publications including the Athletic, GQ, and Gizmodo Media Group expressing frustration that Facebook encouraged the media industry to invest in video while it was allegedly misleading advertisers about the level of engagement of video on its platform.

Publishing executives “all felt like this pivot to video was something that was being pushed on us that we didn’t have the data for,” said Phillip Picardi, editor in chief of Out, a magazine that focuses on LGBTQ fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.

“This was a time in digital media where we pivoted strategies to the changes in Facebook algorithm or the rapidly changing ad business,” Mr. Picardi said.

Mr. Picardi noted that his previous employer, Teen Vogue, was insulated from the industrywide shift toward video in part because decisions about video investment were made by Condé Nast Entertainment, a separate division of the company.

In January, Facebook dealt a blow to publishers that had bet big on social video by announcing plans to prioritize posts that are shared and discussed among users and their friends.

A month later, Vox Media laid off employees of its sites’ social-video teams, who accounted for about 5% of its entire staff. Vox Media Chief Executive Jim Bankoff said at the time that the layoffs were prompted by the realization that social-video initiatives won’t be “viable audience or revenue growth drivers.”

Some in the publishing industry balk at connecting allegations that Facebook misled advertisers with the hapless investment in video produced for social media.

“I completely agree that hiding information intentionally is a bad business practice,” said Rameez Tase, vice president of audience and analytics for Axios. “But that’s completely besides the point when it comes to publishers’ business. The idea that publishers based their decision to pivot to video on this reporting error is categorically false.”

Facebook’s inflated viewership metrics might have resulted in a decrease of advertising dollars being spent on other platforms, but it likely didn’t cause publishers to invest heavily in video by itself, said Alex Skatell, founder of the Independent Journal Review. He noted that Facebook was upfront about the limitations of video advertising products for publishers in 2016, the year that the social-media company was allegedly misleading advertisers.

“Blaming Facebook for a pivot-to-video strategy is a stretch,” Mr. Skatell said.

In July 2016, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said his goal was to turn Facebook into a “video-first” platform, and predicted that within five years or so most of what people consume online would be video.

Media companies and publishers were given inaccurate data about how long their video content was watched across the social network, possibly affecting the types of content they chose to post. But that didn’t affect the ad revenue publishers made from individual videos they did publish, said Joe Speiser, co-founder and former chief executive of the women-focused media company LittleThings. That is because they earn based on “CPM,” or the cost per thousand views that marketers pay.

“Because publishers are paid on a CPM basis, Facebook’s incorrect viewership metrics would only have had an impact on publishers if the corresponding CPMs didn’t regulate to market rates,” Mr. Speiser said. “As we have seen since the metric correction, CPM rates have just climbed to make up for any fall in measured viewership.”