Media companies purchase ad time on Facebook based on metrics the company uses to calculate the average viewing time for its ads. The price the media companies pay is based on that viewing time. Quietly, in September 2016, Facebook posted a notification on its Advertiser Help Center and sent out a notice to its media customers that stated the following, "We recently discovered an error in the way we calculate one of our video metrics." Facebook indicated that its finding did not affect billing.

However, the statement missed the critical part of its metric discovery. Facebook had been basing its viewing time only on videos of more than three seconds. With that exclusion, what Facebook was claiming as average video viewing time to its media buyers was overstated by \(60 \%\) to \(80 \%\). That reality would have affected two things in the mediabuy negotiations: (1) how much they were willing to pay for Facebook space and (2) how many total Facebook buys they would make. The misrepresentation could have prevented media buys on YouTube, Twitter, and even on television. Their metrics did not exclude the lower-end view times, so their average view time would have been lower than Facebook's.

Facebook has pledged to include all videos now in its metric. One media company explained to its client about the new Facebook metric, "Essentially, they're coming up with new names for what they were supposed to measure in the first place......................

 Discussion Questions

 1. What was the result of Facebook's metric for ad buyers?
2. What does the closing statement mean-that Facebook was promising to do what it should have done from the beginning?
3. Do you think Facebook was unaware of the implications of its metric?