* Wall Street Journal…

Big ad buyers and marketers are upset with Facebook Inc. after learning the tech giant vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on its platform for two years, according to people familiar with the situation.

Several weeks ago, Facebook disclosed in a post on its “Advertiser Help Center” that its metric for the average time users spent watching videos was artificially inflated because it was only factoring in video views of more than three seconds. The company said it was introducing a new metric to fix the problem. […]

For the past two years Facebook only counted video views of more than three seconds when calculating its “Average Duration of Video Viewed” metric. Video views of under three seconds were not factored in, thereby inflating the average. Facebook’s new metric, “Average Watch Time,” will reflect video views of any duration. That will replace the earlier metric.

* That’s plenty bad enough, but check this out from the Atlantic…

The roots of this miscalculation go back to one of the founding assumptions of Facebook video. The platform counts every instance of a video playing for longer than three seconds as a “view,” saying that that is long enough to count as “intent to watch.”

Three seconds is counted as a view? Really?

* No wonder YouTube videos don’t claim as many views as FB videos…

Professional YouTube video makers like Hank Green loathe this approach. Last year, Green accused Facebook of lying to juice video metrics, arguing that a “view” should only be registered when someone watches most or all of a video (which is how YouTube counts them). He also said it cheated by boosting native Facebook videos into people’s News Feeds well above embedded YouTube videos or Vines.

* From Green’s post…

In our analytics-obsessed world, it’s tempting to first ask how to measure whether something is a view, but if we take a step back and just ask what a “view” is, the answer becomes clearer. What is a view? It’s when someone watches the video. And Facebook counts views significantly before people could be said to be watching the video.

Facebook counts the “view” at the three second mark (whether or not the viewer has even turned on the sound) in the midst of a precipitous decline in retention. At that moment, 90% of people scrolling the page are still ‘watching’ this silent animated GIF. But by 30 seconds, when viewership actually could be claimed, only 20% are watching. 90% of people are being counted, but only 20% of people are actually “viewing” the video.

YouTube, on the other hand, counts views in a logical way…the view is counted at the point at which people seem to actually be engaging with the video and not just immediately clicking away. This is usually around 30 seconds, but of course is different for videos of different lengths.

*** UPDATE ***  But FB can be an effective tool for some things. From the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners…

“Earlier this week, we were receiving about 120 to 140 online registrations daily. Suddenly this morning, that number in our inbox jumped to more than 1,400,” said Chicago Election Board Chairwoman Marisel A. Hernandez.

State officials say a Facebook campaign appears to be contributing to the big increase in activity. In related news, Tuesday, September 27 is National Voter Registration Day.

I asked who was behind the Facebook campaign and was told it was Facebook itself.