Facebook Improves Video Metrics

By @TheMarkDalton

Facebook is dedicated to video content and you can see that it is starting to pay off for them. You can’t scroll far through your news feed now without seeing a video autoplaying somewhere. Video content is appealing, it sucks users in and Facebook knows it.

However, the social network has come under fire in the past. Most notably, they claim to have more viewers than YouTube despite the crucial difference in that Facebook counts a view after mere seconds and YouTube counts a view after a longer period of 30 seconds. This has lead to users calling out Facebook for trying to be misleading, you could count a view on a Facebook video simply by scrolling through your feed even if you are not viewing it.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that they are going to provide enhanced video metrics on its ‘Page Insights’ tab for brands and content creators to make better adjustments to content. One of these metrics is a ‘Minutes Viewed’ stat to help people understand how many total minutes people have watched a video for and there is also a ’10-second view’ metric which shows how many people watched just the start of a video.

Facebook said the following in a blog post.

“Video publishers have told us that they rely on Page Insights to track the performance of their posts and optimize their video content and programming strategies. Today’s updated interface allows for flexibility as we continue to learn more from publishers about the video performance insights that help them grow their businesses on Facebook.”

Facebook is hoping to be able to provide more meaningful insights for video creators which is important as a significant amount of the news feed is now taken up by video content.

However, Facebook still faces criticism from YouTubers as ‘freebooting’ is still a big problem on the platform. Freebooting is the expression given to Facebook users who are downloading content from YouTube and then uploading it as their own content on Facebook without the original uploader’s permission.

While Facebook may be taking the right step forward by giving meaningful insights to video creators, there is still a lot of work to do when it comes to making sure that users are uploading content which is not taken from others.