Facebook has posted amazing results for the past few years both in the number of active users and ad video views. However, this growth especially, for their ad video views, may be questionable it was discovered that since Facebook launched video ads in 2014, the biggest social media network in the world has miscalculated average viewing time. This because it did not include views that lasted less than 3 seconds.
In a post on its ad help center, a Facebook employee wrote: We had previously defined the Average Duration of Video Viewed as “total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who have played the video. But we erroneously had calculated the Average Duration of Video Viewed as the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of people who have viewed a video for three or more seconds.”
In response to this discrepancy, Facebook has introduced: “Video Average Watch Time: the total watch time for your video, divided by the total number of video plays.
“This includes plays that start automatically and on click. This will replace the Average Duration of Video Viewed metric while Video Percentage Watched: reflects the percentage of your video somebody watches per session, averaged across all sessions of your video where the video auto-played or was clicked to play. This will replace the Average % Video Viewed metric.
