Facebook’s Video Analytics Problem
The recent Facebook debacle has helped prove, that indeed, video is the black hole of web analytics.
Who am I to criticize Facebook? They, a technology behemoth, have — literally — billions of users around the world. I am the co-founder of an early stage tech startup. But it’s easy to take shots at the Goliath’s of this world.
And so I will.
The issue, simply put is around video analytics. If you haven’t heard about Facebook’s recent #scandal you can find more information here, here, here, and here.
To be fair, Facebook apologized but, had, for three years, been miscalculating the way they measured video viewership. In doing so, they grossly overstated how much time, on average, its users were spending watching hosted video content.
Long story short, they didn’t account for viewers who watched video content for less than 3 seconds, which on Facebook, accounts for a ton of views. In doing so their viewership numbers were super inflated.
So what?
There is a war going on between Facebook, Google (YouTube), and others for dominance in online advertising. These platforms want advertisers — big and small — to pay for ad space which is then served up to their massive audiences. If you can demonstrate, as Facebook did, that the viewership numbers on your platform are high, advertisers will naturally pay a premium for your ad space.
Here’s my take: it’s all irrelevant. We’re talking about three second views.
So if you happen to be scrolling down your News Feed which contains a video, that video will start auto-playing. If that video stays on your screen, as you’re scrolling (even if it’s on mute) for three seconds, it’s counted as a view.
Scroll up and down this article as you count out three seconds… It’s not a lot of time.
Moreover, my company, Limbik, recently conducted a piece of research which indicated that more than half the population skip videos ads, when they are presented, and an even greater proportion of people simply don’t pay attention to them.
But amazingly, advertisers pay for this space. They pay a lot.
There will always be a place for traditional ads (thank you Spike Jonze). But we’re moving into — if we’re not there already — an era of native advertising, filled with branded integrations, sponsored content, and product placement.
In this world, it is our opinion that measuring the effectiveness of your actual content is equally important to measuring the effectiveness of the ad which got you there.
And so a view of three seconds is meaningless.
Content lives on campaign websites, and pre-roll ads are used to drive audiences to these sites, where they can view longer-form content which actually add value to an audience’s viewing day.
We believe that driving meaningful action starts with measuring attention.
That’s why we created Limbik… to help content creators, content publishers, content distributers, and advertisers understand if people are actually paying attention to their video content, and drive deeper engagement.
