The social network is adding metrics long-sought by publishers and advertisers as part of an update to the insights page for Facebook Pages, announced Thursday. Starting today, page owners will get three new metrics: total minutes of watch time, the number of views that last more than 10 seconds, and the completion rate of videos. All are key since Facebook has faced a lot of cricism for counting even a flash of video swiped by as a "view."
Total watch time, as in consecutive minutes watching a video, was one of the most requested metrics from publishers, Facebook said. Indeed, last July, longtime YouTube star Hank Green published a blog post on Medium titled “Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video" that claimed Facebook's three-second view devalued the content.
Watch time is a metric Alphabet's YouTube has been pushing for years as part of its bid to move beyond the short "view" to longer form, more TV-like entertainment. That metric had been previously unavailable on Facebook.
While Facebook touts 8 billion video views per day, YouTube reported average viewing sessions of mobile video is now up to 40 minutes as of July. Facebook’s new 10-second view count adds an additional statistic that shows how many viewers are engaging.
Along with the new metrics, Facebook Page owners will be able to see clearer performance statistics that are organized into minutes viewed, unique viewers, views, 10-second views and average percent completion. Like on YouTube, Facebook users will still see the view count for three-seconds and not be able to see any additional metrics.
In the Medium blog post from July, Green wrote about the importance of the view as a statistic despite all the controversy around it. “This might seem a little like this is a victimless crime, but it fundamentally devalues the #1 metric of online video. The view is the thing that everyone talks about and it’s the thing creators sell to advertisers in order to make a living,” Green wrote.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video,” he wrote.
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