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.
"I read this as indicating that facebook video ads aren't particularly engaging."
I wonder if most of everything isn't particularly engaging for many people. Think about how much you skim most articles, comments, photo series, how you use your phone while watching TV, etc. Watch someone use Instagram and often they'll look at a photo for a fraction of a second before moving on or giving out a double-tap.
I find myself doing this all the time, even when the show is engaging. I'll automatically open Reddit and start scrolling through the front page, and before I know it I missed 5 minutes of the show. I do it on autopilot, and it annoys and scares me.
Oh yes. I do that a lot with HackerNews, actually. The show goes to one screen, HN goes to the other. I usually start skimming the site when the show gets "slower", only to realize few minutes later that I missed an important part of the action. An annoying habit I try to fight off.
I think it stems from the need to have the brain occupied to some level, and the show reaching close, but not to, that level. I feel the need to add something to cross the boundary. Eating while watching helps (it seems to require just enough cognitive effort to reach the comfort level), but it has its own bad side effects (like scheduling meals to the shows).
Why I quit reddit and uninstalled all the quick games on my phone. After a while I lost the compulsion but it's an interesting experiment to show yourself just how often you're opening your phone for drivel.
A while back I instituted a personal rule that I am not allowed to use my phone or laptop while watching TV or a movie. My rationale is that if I am uninterested enough in the show to need additional distraction, the show is not a good use of my time and I should just turn it off. It was really hard to get out of the habit, but it's worked pretty well for me. I find that I understand and enjoy the shows I'm watching more, and I also watch less TV because I more consciously notice when I'm getting bored, and I go do something else.
You might find this podcast[0] (and his[1] other writings on the subject very interesting.
Cal Newport discusses "Deep Work" and how deep, concentrated, uninterrupted focus is 1) becoming more rare these days with so many feed, notifications, devices, etc. and 2) absolutely essential to being productive and successful in almost any field in today's society / economy.
It's more interesting than I'm describing. Cal's insights into learning, research, lifestyle, studying were very influential on my study habits and mindset during college. Check him out.
These days, I only watch TV (usually through Amazon Prime) on my iPad while using the treadmill or stationary bike. That consumes enough of my attention—and makes it enough of a pain to use my hands—that it prevents the urge to do a third activity while watching. (Plus it's healthy!)
I will do it while watching a movie, except I'll often pause the movie to check a couple of sites (that I've already checked within the last 30 minutes) and before long it's taken me 6 hours across 2-3 nights to watch a 2 hour movie.
It's pretty stupid behaviour. Procrastinating even while relaxing.
I realised this is why I've been enjoying shows with subtitles recently (some anime titles on netflix) because it forces you to watch the show without the constant phone checking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook considers videos viewed after 3 seconds, and YouTube after 30. Instagram after 3, but it counts unique users and not views. Twitter is when someone clicks, and Vine is when someone finishes one loop of the video.
Seems like 5 seconds is a good threshold to determine if someone is going to stay or move along - I assume they rigorously got to this number.
I suppose the next question would be can you correlate the enabling of sound to that 5 second metric, and if so, what is the difference in engagement?
I only wonder further because dialing in ad engagement, especially as it relates to seconds of interactions, is a really interesting way to determine value of these ad plays.
5 seconds seems to short unless paired with page/mouse position, I regularly notice that videos will start playing when they are 2/3rds on the page and I'm read or looking at a picture above it only to scroll right past the video as soon as I register it's of no interest to me.
Advertisers already know this which is why more and more FB videos include subtitles and (the smarter advertisers) will communicate whatever message they're trying to land in the first few seconds of the video.
So even if not 'engaged' with the video still does its job.
Yup – and, as a result, at least one ad tech company has emerged to meet advertisers' need for video caption copywriting, design, and automated testing. And they have customers.
They address the engagement issue in the article, but not in a particularly convincing way : "Internal studies conducted by the agency showed that KPIs like brand lift and intent to purchase were not affected by whether the viewer watched the video with the sound on or off" I wonder if they are actually measuring engagement over a complete feed stream, or just some subset of videos that were allowed to play longer than 10s (guaranteeing a baseline level of engagement).
I almost exclusively use FB on my phone. Anecdotally, I see similar behavior from most of my friends. Yes, many people have headphones for their phones. But my guess is that they are not plugged in most of the time people use their phone, and they're unlikely to plug them in for a brief video.
Most people? Hardly. Of the minority of people that have headsets, a minority thereof are willing to pull them out of their bag to listen to some advertisements.
Also video player is one huge click-machine. Every major player allows you to pause by clicking on video player window, Facebook instead opens player in new "window" with suggested content. I bet this accounts for a lot plays as well. Same way Google was inflating Bing visits by adding dedicated, extremely sensitive search button to Windows mobiles.
The article states 3 seconds is a view. If I'm on desktop and stop to read a post above or below an autoplay video then it would likely count as a view. I'm sure some people do watch video without sound but I agree the 85% figure is likely misleading.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The option to turn Facebook sounds off on desktop was not there for me when they rolled it out (it was for others). I stopped keeping a Facebook tab open.
I think it is. I would bet money that Facebook employs or consults at least one psychologist to help them design their app for maximum addiction. An example from a few weeks ago is how "trending" stories are handpicked by humans.
It's unclear how much A/B testing has to do with this. If I use a mobile user agent (e.g. Nexus 6 via the Chrome Dev Tools) I get the option to enable or disable autoplay.
I don't see it either now, but I guess I'm lucky because I turned it off as soon as Facebook introduced this "feature", so now I really don't have to think about it.
The default settings for mobile was so weird. Auto play videos, and "non-HD" photo and video uploads. I reversed them as I prefer to conserve bandwidth used for my stuff by not playing random clips...
"Non-HD" photos and videos on Facebook are compressed to hell and back... Must be JPEG at something like quality 60%. There's been recommendations to just upload at a high resolution, which works fairly well when viewed on HiDPI displays as the resolution hides the artifacts, but still terrible otherwise. IIRC they had a trial with WebP but abandoned it? It's too bad we don't have good low bandwidth options there, because of course I can see their side of it too. Should honestly have been a problem solved eons ago by now.
I didn't even think to look for this setting on LinkedIn -- it exists there too. Click your avatar > Privacy & Settings and it is on the Basics page a little ways down.
I think imgur remains the best no-nonsense plain image host, although maybe I'm still recovering from years of photobucket.
If you use github or gitlab sites for a personal website, you could probably use your own repo as a miscellaneous image host-- as long as it's within the bounds of their TOS.
> I think imgur remains the best no-nonsense plain image host
Not anymore. They started clean and bloat free and now have a ton of junk on their desktop pages, push you to the mobile app with banners and overlays on their mobile pages, and forcibly redirect (esp mobile) direct-links to the full-page HTML versions [1].
This behavior is believed to be one of the reasons Reddit (which is basically the reason Imgur exists) is now switching to self-hosting images.
> 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.
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
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%?
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.
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.
Unless Facebook is actively trying to slant the number of video views, auto-play should just be disabled. It really doesn't even need to be an option to turn it back on, because I doubt that many would want to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
Maybe you've turned this feature off in the settings -> videos tab? Some people see it, some people don't. I don't see that option now, but I remember turning it off as soon as Facebook introduced autoplaying videos.
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).
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 :).
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".
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.
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.
Actually I have been hearing lots of “trendy” Gen-Zs say this, but the funny thing is all of them post on Facebook regularly, just not as much as their other networks.
Facebook is becoming like email. Everybody uses it, but the “cool” people use something else too.
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