from Hacker News

Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit

by ola on 10/14/19, 5:59 AM with 36 comments

by siruncledrew on 10/14/19, 6:44 AM
Watching acquaintances raise funding around metrics like “viewership”, “engagement”, “reach”, and “accounts” has made me especially weary of companies espousing some kind of Golden Metric (big red flag if they don’t mention earnings/money) as a means to justify they are an awesome business.
It’s just too easy to “fudge the numbers” and give the very-best-case estimates that don’t incorporate uncertainty or sensitivity (or reflect reality). It just takes some non-half-assed due diligence to do a sanity check.
> ”We had 100k new users signup in January”
> “How many were still active a month later?”
> ”... 17k”
...
> ”Our users read an average of 12 stories per day”
> “What counts as a ‘read’?”
> ”Spending at least 3 seconds on a page”
It never gets old the stretches people will make to try to pitch something that is in desperate need of legs to stand on, so whatever metric that looks the best is the one pulled out of the hat.
by _Understated_ on 10/14/19, 7:52 AM
My business partner and I did our best to avoid getting caught up in this race to the bottom with our product. He was convinced we needed more followers on FB and Insta and wanted to target our effort there. We did. We tried and the figures just do not support it.
From all the figures we had available (sample size of 1 here!) we worked out that for every 8 sales we needed 10,000 likes of our product.
10,000 likes to get approximately 8 sales.
Not sure what the ratio of views:likes is but I bet it's 100:1 or something.
It's a full time job to manage people on social media but it's a total con: it takes masses of "engagement" (or whatever their bullshit is called) in order to get a sale.
I suppose it's the myth of the long tail marketplace: There's not enough business from it to sustain me but when you scale up to 100 Million business like me (none of which make much money) it becomes profitable for the marketplace owner.
by dang on 10/14/19, 7:11 AM
We changed the url from https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1183207739675291654 to the article it points to. If there's a better article on this, we can change it again.
Submitted title was "Facebook's viewership metrics were inflated by 150 to 900%".
by cwkoss on 10/14/19, 6:42 AM
Impression fraud is going to be a huge scandal. So many view counts are inflated for profit - either by platforms themselves or by third-party bots interacting with content.
by buboard on 10/14/19, 7:38 AM
This is incredibly serious, as this kind of fraud might have lured billions in advertising money to go to facebook instead of other platforms. It's a pity it was settled and we ll not know the extent of the fraud.
by dannyr on 10/14/19, 7:45 AM
Settlement is a joke.
It's definitely worth it for Facebook to cheat and break laws when the fine you'll get is just peanuts.
by Animats on 10/14/19, 6:56 AM
Hm? Who pays for "views"? I thought ad buyers insisted on paying only for click-through, as a minimum.
by vfc1 on 10/14/19, 6:36 AM
Strange, nowhere in the article does it say how did they know that the views where inflated by 150 to 900%. How did they even know, without Facebook admitting it?
I don't think they did, because even if they settled for 40M they say the process is without merit. Where does that information come from?
by jonny383 on 10/14/19, 8:15 AM
I'm really starting to wonder about other possible _shady_ things that go on at Facebook, but are swept under the rug or go unreported.
Just in case you were not already aware, Facebook is not to be trusted under any circumstances.
by carokann on 10/14/19, 6:51 AM
So many companies sunk investment with no returns, so many people lost their jobs trying to figure out what went wrong...
by otalp on 10/14/19, 7:56 AM
When the fine is that low it's not punishment, but the fee to get away with fraud
by theqult on 10/14/19, 8:11 AM
"The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%," stated an amended complaint."
I'm curious to understand how they proved it
by gbersac on 10/14/19, 8:46 AM
How is that even a problem? I ran facebook ads for a few month and I didn't event care about the number of views. All I stared at was the ROI. Ads are profitable ? => I keep the ad runing. Not profitable ? => I stop them.
If some user are stupid enough to run unprofitable ads, it's their problem.