Facebook in a soup (again!) for inflating video view time to advertisers

Shortly after the disaster over the Facebook Trends, the social media giant found itself in more trouble. This time for miscalculating the duration for which the video ads are viewed by its users, Facebook has managed to anger quite a few ad buyers and marketers.

The view time is a major parameter for marketers when it comes to marketing over social media. And the buyers found out that Facebook Inc has been overestimating their view time for the last two years, The Wall Street Journal reported.

They had been accidentally overstating the time by up to 80%.

Ad buying agency Publicis Media, was notified that Facebook had overestimated average time spent watching videos by between 60% and 80%, after Facebook reportedly told its advertisers that it had accidentally been excluding videos that were watched for less than 3 seconds from its "Average duration of video watched" measurement.

Facebook is also introducing a new measurement called "Average watch time" that will include all the videos watched irrespective of the duration it has been watched for, Business Insider reported.

In a note to clients, Publicis also said that the new measurements were being introduced to make Facebook's earlier miscalculation more obscure. "In an effort to distance themselves from the incorrect metrics, Facebook is deprecating [the old metrics] and introducing ‘new’ metrics in September. Essentially, they’re coming up with new names for what they were meant to measure in the first place," the note said.