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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

"My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes."

With all the recent news [0] coming out around FB and their practices, I've only one thing to say now: I knew they were evil, but I didn't think they were stupid too.

[0] 'fake', who knows after this article?

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I worked at a company where they hired a new marketing VP.

After a year the CEO stood up with the marketing VP to talk about their amazing marketing accomplishments. I was confused as still nobody really knew our company other than existing customers, our marketing was awkward, social media accounts even more awkward and dumb, and so on.

So they rolled out their big marketing accomplishment. Old youtube advertisements (also way awkward / looked like a video of a bad power point presentation) had been skipped by users at a high rate. Now, ZERO of our youtube ads had been skipped in the past 6 months. This of course made little sense as someone, somewhere, had to have skipped an advertisement right?

Turns out they shortened the ads so that they were below the time that allowed a user to click skip.... and this was their big accomplishment.

It was a non real accomplishment as far as I was concerned ... but they got all the high fives and bonuses, so I guess it was real.

It may actually be an accomplishment. They figured out how to take advantage of the system so that users could not skip your ads. That might be a great thing. But the nature of the accomplishment requires you to change your metrics to evaluate the success of your ad campaigns rather than keep the same metrics and label yourselves a success.

Perception is reality in a lot of the bigger orgs. That said, physics and economics still catch up sooner or later, though typically later.

Glad to hear you've moved on. I hope the current 'thing you do all day' isn't quite as easily fooled.

I didn't really understand this criticism. If one were to say that American's on average watch almost 4 hours of television per day[1], is it at all misleading that this might not be done in a solid block? All the other criticisms aside, I'm just fine with saying "1 minute per day" even if this involves several short videos.

[1] Yes, this actually is the correct figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption. 3 hr 58 min per day; 35.5 hr per week; 77 days per year. And if you are thinking to yourself "Well I don't watch any!", remember that this just means someone else is watching twice the average to make up the difference.

A minute is a small time. Small enough that it can be comprised fully of mistaken video starts.

Given that the videos auto-play, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the count was from videos autoplaying as people scrolled theough.

So, in other words, you are in no way misled by Facebook's wording. Just other people might be and that's wrong!

Disagree. Five seconds is in that category, one minute is in the “ha ha my cat fell off my bed isn’t that cute” category.

The 1 minute can just be 5 seconds 12 times, which is pretty easy to accomplish with autoplay while scrolling Facebook while never deliberately watching anything.

Vegging in front a TV for two hours can be accomplished without deliberately watching anything.

It's a captive pair of eyes that can be subliminally programmed, even if no deliberately watching.

But even if you passively watch TV while doing something else - like cooking for instance - you at least show the intent to do that. Your TV doesn't turn itself off and play in the background even if you actively don't want it like web auto-play videos attached to unrelated content (your social feed) do.

Both the TV and FB numbers are potentially misleading.

The FB numbers likely include accidental plays and plays by people who watch a few seconds trying to identify what a video is, then move on. Nobody would say they watched football last night if they flipped past ESPN and left the game on for a few seconds to see who was playing, but if Facebook were showing the game they would count these people as viewers.

A lot of people who don't watch a lot of TV hear the TV numbers and picture someone sitting on the couch watching the screen for four hours a day, when it's more likely people who leave the TV on while doing other things. If you called these people on the phone and said what are you doing, they'd probably say "making dinner" or something similar, not "watching TV."

> If you called these people on the phone and said what are you doing, they'd probably say "making dinner" or something similar, not "watching TV."

While it only ever measures a sample size of participants and thus is still misleading, that's not how the Nielsen metrics work. You have to opt into the program and self-report your usage, specifically what shows you actually watch.

Usually with online video an HTTP request gets sent at different points to note how far they got in the video (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Ad_Serving_Template). You normally see an exponential drop off, with many people watching only a few seconds. A lot of those minutes are likely people accidentally watching a few seconds of auto-playing video as they scroll through facebook.

I'd note that television viewing statistics are also likely inflated, at least for a normal person's definition of "watching TV". How often have you been in front of a TV in a bar or airport, but no one is actually watching?

TV viewing in bars and other public locations is specifically excluded from TV viewing numbers. The same is true for hospitals, asylums, prisons, nursing homes, and even college dormitories.

Also, the way it works is that the broadcast only gets counted as viewed if someone watches for 300 continuous seconds. And then credit is only given for the 15-minute block (:00-:15, :15-:30, :30-:45, :45-:00) in which that 300 second span happened. And if the 300-seconds spans a 15-minute boundary, then it doesn't count at all.

For example, if someone watches a TV program from 6:01pm until 6:07pm, the broadcaster gets credit for 6:00pm-6:15pm.

If someone watches from 6:11pm-6:19pm, it doesn't count at all.

I'm not sure why this is defined as "300 seconds" and not "five minutes." When I was in broadcasting, I used the phrase "five minutes" twice and was harshly corrected by my bosses both times, so there must be a reason.

The TV stats are determined by an independent body (Nielsen). Facebook calculates it’s own stats and they obviously have a huge incentive to publish the most favourable usage statistics possible.

I tend to consider internet measures to be 0.1% of real world measures anyway. You don't perceive, think, feel the same when you went out to see something in the flesh. If you divide internet time by the ratio of ADD in each user at the time you get epsilon

That's a good point, but I think many of these videos only require 5 seconds to really get the point.

If Facebook wants to say I watched 1 minute of videos and its because they saw me stop scrolling and continuously digest a couple seconds of some buzzfeed video that is fine with me and I would think is honest.

But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched.

But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched.

Worse, they count videos that auto-played on the page after you scrolled, then walked away from the computer to get a beverage.

Nothing about that statement suggests that anyone watches an uninterrupted minute of anything.

If I say I drink 2l of water a day, it's not a reasonable interpretation that I'm quaffing 2l in one sitting once every 24 hours.

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