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David Paul Morris / Bloomberg.
In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement that would change the course of the world of digital media: in five years, Facebook would consist mainly of videos. In response, advertisers and publishers have begun to devote resources to video, sometimes sending entire teams of writers to recruit producers to collect short, "sticky" video content. Four months later, Facebook revealed a crucial mistake. Over the past two years, the company admitted in a message posted in August 2016 on its advertising help center page that it had overwhelmingly overestimated the average viewing time of video ads on his platform.
The discrepancy stems from the way Facebook has measured the engagement of users. The company initially counted video views that averaged more than three seconds longer than its "average video viewing time" metric, excluding views of less than three seconds, effectively inflating the average. After reporting the error in August, Facebook said in a statement that it "recently discovered" the problem and replaced its indicator with the more accurate "average standby time". But according to a new lawsuit that has allowed a group of California small advertisers to review some 80,000 pages of internal records on Facebook, it seems that Facebook was aware of the problem well before it claimed it. By The Wall Street Journal:
In June 2016, nearly a year later, a Facebook technical manager, responding to the complaints of advertisers, had debated the problem internally, writing: "In one way or another other, the task has not progressed for the year. "Strategy" no public relations "to avoid attracting attention on the subject.
Facebook decided to "hide the fact that we ruined everything," the complaint said, quoting Facebook documents.
At the time, Facebook had told advertisers that it had overestimated the views of at most 80%. In Tuesday's complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that the average audience figures had in fact been exaggerated from 150% to 900%. Facebook has decided to reject the claims of advertisers. "It is wrong to suggest in any way that we try to hide this problem from our partners," said a spokeswoman for the company. Newspaper. "We reported the error to our customers when we discovered and updated our help center to explain the problem."
If, as the advertisers claim, the company has hidden its mistake, it could also be responsible for the upheavals that followed in the media industry, including a considerable number of layoffs. The famous "pivot video" was created around 2015 and has mainly swept the ranks of media companies focused on the millennium. It was the year of today. This announced that he would not have a homepage and would only post clips on social media platforms. Business Insider has adopted the same tactic by launching Insider the same year (the site now has its own home page). In addition, in accordance with Zuckerberg's 2016 statement that Facebook's future was video, many companies have begun to overhaul their editorial strategies: MTV News, Vice, Vocativ, Mic, and Mashable have all been made redundant. 2016 and 2017 when they announced their intention to reduce their workforce. and rotate to the video. (At one point, Facebook paid media companies to produce video for its site, although the initiative was eventually destroyed.)
For a time, the video looked like the future of the media. But last year, even companies like BuzzFeed, which supposedly generated a lot of revenue from video initiatives, missed their key goals – a red flag saying the video may have been to be not the savior that she was supposed to be. This has led to more cuts in places like Vox Media and Mic. Some of these cuts include newly installed video team members, which may be a tacit acknowledgment that companies have not achieved the expected returns. Then Facebook added an insult to his injury: in January, he announced his intention to downplay the content of publishers and brands and promote the content of family and friends.
Of course, Facebook's inflated sight statistics are by no means to blame for tectonic change in the media sphere. Shortsighted leaders, those who are desperate to follow the money, who have not questioned the long-term goals of technology giants shaping their industry, are also at fault. Moreover, the great pivot was probably condemned from the beginning; Google and Facebook control the vast majority of the digital advertising market and, apart from the optics, they have no prerogative to be interested in media companies. Facebook's alleged decision to deliberately conceal inaccuracies from its own parameters did nothing to improve the situation. But in the end, publishers are only responsible for the loss of good journalism jobs.
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