
Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit - ola
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-million-under-proposed-settlement-video-metrics-suit-1245807
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siruncledrew
Watching acquaintances raise funding around metrics like “viewership”,
“engagement”, “reach”, and “accounts” has made me especially weary of
companies espousing some kind of Golden Metric (big red flag if they don’t
mention earnings/money) as a means to justify they are an awesome business.

It’s just too easy to “fudge the numbers” and give the very-best-case
estimates that don’t incorporate uncertainty or sensitivity (or reflect
reality). It just takes some non-half-assed due diligence to do a sanity
check.

> _”We had 100k new users signup in January”_

> “How many were still active a month later?”

> _”... 17k”_

...

> _”Our users read an average of 12 stories per day”_

> “What counts as a ‘read’?”

> _”Spending at least 3 seconds on a page”_

It never gets old the stretches people will make to try to pitch something
that is in desperate need of legs to stand on, so whatever metric that looks
the best is the one pulled out of the hat.

~~~
buboard
Ideally you want to correlate the metric with the dollar ROI. I have yet to
see extensive reports on that about google & FB. It's crazy to think the
amount of money being thrown at them willy-nilly

~~~
lucasverra
John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was a very successful United States merchant,
religious leader and political figure, considered by some to be a "pioneer in
marketing”. He opened one of the first and most successful department stores
in the United States, which grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of
Macy’s.

He is credited with coining the phrase “Half the money I spend on advertising
is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

src : [https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/resources/blog/half-
money...](https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/resources/blog/half-money-i-
spend-advertising-wasted-trouble-i-dont-know-which-half)

my 2 cts : there was never a culture of performance in marketing. Its very
hard, especially in a phygital scenario (digital ad, real world spending)

~~~
buboard
That's a great excuse for 1830 but today i would expect to see tens of precise
, large scale studies from an industry that spends billions every year. The
fact that I don't, makes me suspicious

~~~
disgruntledphd2
These studies exist, but tend not to be published. Essentially there's little
to no commercial benefit from publishing, so people tend not to.

Like, I would argue that 80-90% of Goog/FB revenue is correlated with sales.
This may be done badly (often), but it is done.

~~~
buboard
So how do advertisers find out who has the most effective ad system if they re
not getting published? They choose in the dark?

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_Understated_
My business partner and I did our best to avoid getting caught up in this race
to the bottom with our product. He was convinced we needed more followers on
FB and Insta and wanted to target our effort there. We did. We tried and the
figures just do not support it.

From all the figures we had available (sample size of 1 here!) we worked out
that for every 8 sales we needed 10,000 likes of our product.

10,000 likes to get approximately 8 sales.

Not sure what the ratio of views:likes is but I bet it's 100:1 or something.

It's a full time job to manage people on social media but it's a total con: it
takes masses of "engagement" (or whatever their bullshit is called) in order
to get a sale.

I suppose it's the myth of the long tail marketplace: There's not enough
business from it to sustain me but when you scale up to 100 Million business
like me (none of which make much money) it becomes profitable for the
marketplace owner.

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dang
We changed the url from
[https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1183207739675291654](https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1183207739675291654)
to the article it points to. If there's a better article on this, we can
change it again.

Submitted title was "Facebook's viewership metrics were inflated by 150 to
900%".

~~~
tomp
should be pinned-at-top comment

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cwkoss
Impression fraud is going to be a huge scandal. So many view counts are
inflated for profit - either by platforms themselves or by third-party bots
interacting with content.

~~~
AndrewThrowaway
Once upon a time we have launched a rich media banner with three videos in it.
What was interesting that all three videos generated around the same
viewability stats. What was event more interesting that one video in banner
was hidden with display:none.

I wonder if anybody does test like this - e.g. checks if hidden video
generates views, button with visibility: hidden generates clicks and etc. and
in this way evaluates traffic.

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buboard
This is incredibly serious, as this kind of fraud might have lured billions in
advertising money to go to facebook instead of other platforms. It's a pity it
was settled and we ll not know the extent of the fraud.

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dannyr
Settlement is a joke.

It's definitely worth it for Facebook to cheat and break laws when the fine
you'll get is just peanuts.

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Animats
Hm? Who pays for "views"? I thought ad buyers insisted on paying only for
click-through, as a minimum.

~~~
Gustomaximus
It really depends on platform. Adwords/FB are PPC. But many of the smaller
alternate display networks charge by CPM (1000 views) or similar.

As a rule of thumb paying for views means lower value. Often networks try and
justify it and say we are as 'premium network'. I treat those words as a red
flag more than CPM as I'm yet to test a 'premium network' that has better ROI
or customers than others. All that said, sometimes CPM can strike gold if you
know what/where/who to buy, but if your taking sales pitches from reps its
more often not good.

But sometimes your company is pushing for growth, you've maxed out the
performing channels and you have to go for the low or negative ROI sources to
reach total targets and when all things are merged metrics work out for the
business.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Public Service Announcement: Most FB ads are charged on a CPM basis. Note that
they are _optimised_ and often _measured_ on a PPC basis, but they are not
charged that way.

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vfc1
Strange, nowhere in the article does it say how did they know that the views
where inflated by 150 to 900%. How did they even know, without Facebook
admitting it?

I don't think they did, because even if they settled for 40M they say the
process is without merit. Where does that information come from?

~~~
luu
> Strange, nowhere in the article does it say how did they know that the views
> where inflated by 150 to 900%. How did they even know, without Facebook
> admitting it?

> I don't think they did

From the complaint at
[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5004295/d5cb8373-...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5004295/d5cb8373-8cbb-4e81-9710-f2ccf4481b74.pdf):

 _In September 2016, the Wall Street Journal revealed that, for the past two
years, Facebook had been overstating the average time its users spent watching
paid video advertisements. Based on information from advertising agencies who
had spoken with Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s
metrics had been overstated by between 60 and 80%. In response to the media
attention, Facebook admitted it made a mistake, but emphasized that it had
only discovered the mistake “about a month ago,” … Internal records recently
produced in this litigation suggest, … Facebook did not discover its mistake
one month before its public announcement. Facebook engineers knew for over a
year, and multiple advertisers had reported aberrant results caused by the
miscalculation (such as 100% average watch times for their video ads)._

It seems that advertisers saw things that were obviously incorrect (e.g., 100%
average watch times). Some kind of weirdness eventually led to a lawsuit.
During the suit, the plaintiffs found evidence in internal documents that
indicated that at least some engineers in Facebook knew there was a problem
and maybe knew the magnitude of the problem. I wouldn't call that "Facebook
admitting it". It sounds more like Facebook handed over some documents that
they were legally obligated to hand over and then some lawyers read the
documents.

If you're curious about the evidence, most of the court documents are public
and available online, although the smoking gun on the percentage appears to be
sealed.

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jonny383
I'm really starting to wonder about other possible _shady_ things that go on
at Facebook, but are swept under the rug or go unreported.

Just in case you were not already aware, Facebook is not to be trusted under
any circumstances.

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carokann
So many companies sunk investment with no returns, so many people lost their
jobs trying to figure out what went wrong...

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otalp
When the fine is that low it's not punishment, but the fee to get away with
fraud

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theqult
"The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were
inflated by some 150 to 900%," stated an amended complaint."

I'm curious to understand how they proved it

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gbersac
How is that even a problem? I ran facebook ads for a few month and I didn't
event care about the number of views. All I stared at was the ROI. Ads are
profitable ? => I keep the ad runing. Not profitable ? => I stop them.

If some user are stupid enough to run unprofitable ads, it's their problem.

~~~
alwayseasy
Wait, do you really think people who don't fit your narrow advertising use
cases are stupid?

How do you stare at the ROI for a CPG brand looking to build awareness for
their campaign or product?

Media companies that pivoted to Facebook videos looked at user engagement in
the form of video views and would market their size to advertisers.

