
85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound - prostoalex
http://digiday.com/platforms/silent-world-facebook-video/
======
AndrewKemendo
Videos on facebook auto-play in silence as you scroll through your feed. It's
only once you click on them that sound is enabled.

Given the 85% figure - I would not be surprised if the "watched" metrics
simply means it loads the video and begins playing it.

That means _potentially_ only 15% of all facebook videos are actually engaged
on.

We need more data on how long someone needs to view the video to consider it
"watched." The way I understand it [1], is that facebook counts any video as
watched so long as it shows - much like adwords impressions. Only if it goes
equal to or past 10 seconds is it counted differently.

I read this as indicating that facebook video ads aren't particularly
engaging.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1582420952009573](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1582420952009573)

~~~
soneca
I read it different. From personal experience alone I watch a lot of videos on
FB fully without ever clicking to listen the audio. And several content
producers are adapting to this by creating video where audio is optional. With
subtitles or sometimes it is nothing more than a "animated slide
presentation". But also videos like highlights of NBA games.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I'd like to point out that this is but a single data point.

~~~
dasil003
You can say that any time anyone says anything (and on HN someone usually
does), but if you think about it for more than half a second, actually it is
more than a single data point if multiple content producers are optimizing
video for silent viewing.

~~~
Touche
> You can say that any time anyone says anything (and on HN someone usually
> does)

As well they should, personal anecdotes rarely contribute much to the
conversation.

~~~
pvg
It's a conversation-demolishing verbal tic, along with incantations about
causation and correlation, straw people, ad homunculi and the like. Avoiding
these helps conversations stay conversations rather than tedious protocol.

~~~
Touche
Some of us find conversations that devolve into these things to be incredibly
frustrating to be part of. People love to share anecdotes about themselves but
rarely care much for others peoples' anecdotes.

Before sharing that you prefer pepsi over coke you should ask yourself whether
you care at all that some stranger on the internet prefers coke over pepsi.
Assuming the answer is 'no', then why bother sharing these sorts of things
yourself.

------
LeoPanthera
You can turn off auto-play of videos here:

[https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=videos](https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=videos)

Edit: Apparently some people don't see that setting. These are the settings I
see: [http://i.imgur.com/XexAp8k.png](http://i.imgur.com/XexAp8k.png)

(Aside: Anyone recommend a better image host than imgur?)

~~~
plorg
For me, visiting on desktop only allows me to choose between "SD only" and "HD
when available". There is no option for "disable autoplay".

~~~
tdkl
Congrats, you're in special Facebook mind control "feature" testing group.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Is A/B testing really so insidious?

~~~
Jordrok
If the purpose of the test is to subtly herd your users towards a result which
is good for business but bad for the users, then yes.

------
amelius
> 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound

Probably for the better because I suspect a large percentage of watchings is
happening in the office without the boss knowing.

Sadly, we are living in an era where everybody has a television set on their
desk, and is watching the equivalent of America's funniest homevideos all day.
Apparently without sound.

~~~
Raphmedia
As someone who mainly browse on the phone, I have gotten used to browsing with
sound off.

The issue is not that I am hiding from my boss (I have a computer and
headphones at work).

The issue is that I don't want everyone in the same room as I am to hear my
youtube videos.

------
LionessLover
I don't need sound on a cat video. I'm quite content watching the kitty in
silence. Except for that 1 minute video where the cat meows to "happy
birthday". Or the budgie-and-cat video, because the bird sounds cool and it
helps to see how patient (or lazy) that cat is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmfnnKSMiVk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmfnnKSMiVk)

~~~
usrusr
I wholeheartedly agree. Facebook video is an offer, you look at it or you
don't, perfectly content in the knowledge that you won't miss something
important. Audio would remove that choice.

For me, the headline reads "15% of Facebook video is watched with sound". An
amazing number, what are those 15%?

------
nichochar
This is quite frustrating to read. You cannot write about this stuff without
carefully defining the terms.

What does a video being watched mean? It could be 10s, 20s, scrolled to the
end, ...

What does sound enabled mean? It could mean sound clicked, but right at the
end of the video, it could mean 10s with sounds, 20s, etc...

Take articles that do not carefully define engagement metrics with a pinch of
salt.

------
jsat
While autoplay has a major hand in this statistic, users know they can get
sound for the video if they want, and it looks like users are willingly
watching entire videos without sound (autoplay ends if you continue
scrolling). I think it's analogous to the rise in popularity of gif(v)s.

The moving pictures in the Harry Potter world's newspapers seem oddly
prophetic now.

~~~
donkeyd
My feed is comprised of a lot of snowboard videos. I often watch these videos
without sound because it's not necessary to hear the music.

------
Bahamut
I'm watching those videos in public most of the time - the last thing I want
is to be that asshole who plays the sound out loud in public. I could bring
headphones with me some of those times, but I don't really find a compelling
reason to listen to anything on my cellphone.

------
jgh
No kidding, it autoplays every fucking video regardless of if you're on wifi
or not.

~~~
spyspy
Paper has an option to disable autoplay. I'd be surprised if the main app
didn't.

~~~
electrum
Website:
[https://www.facebook.com/help/1406493312950827](https://www.facebook.com/help/1406493312950827)

App: [https://www.facebook.com/help/ipad-
app/1406493312950827](https://www.facebook.com/help/ipad-app/1406493312950827)

------
Santosh83
Now that ever more sites are transitioning to HTML5 videos, we need easy-to-
use and ubiquitous browser options or addons to disable the autoplay of such
videos as well as GIFs. Not everyone everywhere is on cheap broadband or
fiber. Am rather surprised none of the browser vendors nor any addon maker has
implemented such a functionality yet, although I'm most likely overlooking
something here.

~~~
schiffern
On Firefox set _media.autoplay.enabled_ to false under about:config. As of
version 41 this blocks play() unless you've interacted with the video.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659285)

You can also set _plugins.click_to_play_ to true to do the same for Flash.

------
randycupertino
I always keep the sound off, mainly because I read facebook in bed next to my
significant other when I can't sleep. I don't want to wake her up blaring some
cat video.

------
MattBearman
Content creators have known this for a long time, and it's become a self-
fulfilling prophecy/positive feedback loop.

Most videos I see on Facebook now have subtitles, because most people watch
them without sound. And now because most videos have subtitles, I don't have
to click on a video that catches my interest.

------
NEDM64
Considering the awful compressed audio that goes with ads, it's a good thing.

I could stand ads and TV if it weren't for the blasting audio.

~~~
steve-benjamins
It really is bad. I can't upload my band's music videos to Facebook video
because the compression is so distorting...

~~~
dylan604
When creating a new compression spec, my team always sacrificed a slight bit
of the video bit rate to ensure the audio bit rate was high enough to not be
annoying. For example, doubling 64k to 128k makes significant improvement to
audio, but does not really help/hurt the video. Take a low bit rate video and
have one version with decent audio and another with bad audio, and people will
say that the video with bad audio is worse even though the video quality did
not change.

------
gremy0
Also worth noting that content creators have caught on to this already and are
tailoring videos be without sound. There's defiantly a facebook style of video
emerging that would look out of place on more traditional video hosts.

~~~
Tomrn
Yep, the last few movie trailers I've seen on there have been subtitled. I
assumed this was the reason. If this sees us getting more and better quality
subs for video content then I'm all for it.

------
Mahn
I almost always watch YouTube videos without sound. For me putting the
headphones on and fully concentrating on the sound and image of a video is too
big of a "commitment" when I don't even know what the video is about. It's
simply more comfortable and effortless to skim through it without sound unless
I really know I want to hear what's going on. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot
of people did this, specially at work. Heck, I would even speculate that it's
probably fueled the rise of macro memes and animated gifs.

------
koolba
Who knew there would be a silent film[1] renaissance in 2016?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film)

------
werber
I think that 85% is pretty reasonable, most content creators provide subtitles
now, and the audio is often superfluous (I'm looking at you BuzzFeed Tasty
clips!).

------
original_idea
85% of all videos I watch are without sound. BECAUSE I'M LISTENING TO
SOMETHING ELSE!

------
thesumofall
What an utter waste of resources. I don't even want to know how much power
these videos consume on server side and client side

------
sehutson
I've fielded calls from several older relatives who thought their computers
were broken because videos on Facebook had no sound. They saw the video
playing and had no idea they would need to take further action if they wanted
sound.

------
kimi
95% of the videos I watch on youtube are without video - I just use playlists
for music.

------
kbody
When you train (involuntarily) your users of low quality and spam/ads, they
will be using it in the most unobtrusive way and the way you hoped they
wouldn't.

------
intrasight
My FB videos don't auto-play. There is a play button displayed in a still. I'm
glad it doesn't auto-play, but am curious why I don't observe this.

~~~
JamesSwift
Mine never used to, and would always bug out when I clicked play due to having
flashbock enabled in firefox. Then I disabled flashblock and now all of my
feed videos autoplay (and don't bug out).

~~~
richforrester
For some reason I read your entire post in a voice sounding equal parts
surprised and annoyed at Facebook not optimizing for the Flashblock add-on.

However, I'm going to assume that's just my narrow, PEBKAC'd mind.

------
hetfeld
The average conversion from facebook videos are like 0.001%.

Just fyi.

------
gregorkas
Sounds like they could optimise the costs by encoding two versions of the
video - one without the sound that would play by default, and the other when
you click on the actual video.

The CDN invoice probably isn't the smallest of sums you can imagine :).

~~~
TeMPOraL
The size of the audio track is probably around 2% of the size of the whole
video. I don't think they'll bother :).

~~~
gremy0
2% of a bazillions of dollars is still like nearly a bazillion dollars.

~~~
TeMPOraL
They'd have to either strip audio out of the video stream on the fly, which
will probably force them to use less "dumb" CDNs and incur a processing time
cost (which, like most today's on-line businesses, they happily offload to
their users now), or they'd have to keep two copies of the same video on their
servers, which would make it cost 2x "a bazillions of dollars".

~~~
gremy0
You are very probably right the simple solution makes sense. It is an
interesting optimization to be able to make though.

------
abvishek
Videos starts playing when automatically, Most annoying feature of facebook.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
And a lot of the videos Facebook shows are stolen:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q)

------
erikb
I wouldn't be surprised if most people don't even realise that they watch a
video and not a gif. People are not known to understand interfaces
intuitively.

------
yelnatz
A tidbit that I found interesting recently is that their video stream is
different from the audio stream source.

Kind of a no-brainer optimization if you think about it.

------
wnevets
Not really surprising. I rarely watch videos that people share on facebook or
reddit, however if I'll watch gifs all day on the same sites.

------
vkjv
Judging exclusively by the number of videos I see with captions, I imagine
this statistic was at least intuitively known if not specifically.

------
nkristoffersen
Talkies are just a fad anyway ;-)

------
Bouazizalex
Mostly due to Autoplay... Having no concerns on wasting bandwith sure helps

------
neelkadia
same with pornhub I guess ;)

~~~
Dawny33
I'm judging you now!

------
adultSwim
(Auto)Played != Watched

------
sinkensabe
I reckon this is also true for Instagram

------
Necron
Auto-play: what a waste of bandwidth.

------
peterbe
"watched" :)

------
aqibgatoo
Video on Facebook is shit

------
tehchromic
or eyes! lol

------
askyourmother
You know why we turn the sound off? Have you heard how whiny and self
righteous millennials are?

------
jomamaxx
Who actually uses Facebook?

~~~
TickleSteve
The whole world....

Denying facts doesn't make you look intelligent.

~~~
jomamaxx
Definitely not 'the whole world'. Almost nobody I know uses Facebook any any
serious sense. Facebook 'login' \- yes. Sometimes to contact someone. Some
lazy browsing. But nobody uses it in terms of the 'Facebook experience' as we
come to know it.

I suggest that the majority of FB 'daily active' users amounts to logins. I
check FB once every few months and yet surely, I'm commenting or logging in
somewhere under FB pretenses.

I suggest FB is dying as we know it, though clinging on in peripheral usage
and it's new messaging app.

------
tacos
Because bots don't have ears.

