Facebook’s Biggest Boondoggle Is Hyping Video
The social media platform misled advertisers and news organizations by inflating users’ preference for clips over the written word.
But can he sell?
Photographer: Andrea Kamal/Moment Mobile EDFacebook has been accused of misleading advertisers about the viewership of its video content. The important question isn’t whether the social-media company didn’t tell advertisers as soon as it knew it had inflated the numbers (it says it did) but whether the video-content boom, which the social network has actively fueled since 2014, reflects any consumer demand.
In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the previous two years, Facebook overestimated the attention videos got on its platform by using a metric that exaggerated the average amount of time users spent looking at a video. The higher number led advertisers to believe that users had a higher engagement with their content than Facebook actually achieved.