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What Qualifies as a View?

Many of us have Facebook profiles and almost all of us are familiar with Google’s video service, YouTube. Other video watching sites and applications exist as well (Vine, Twitter, and Instagram). Frequently, we hear statements like, “Rihanna’s new music video has over 5 million views!” However, it’s difficult to decide what exactly a view is. In an article on Marketing Land, Martin Beck describes how social media sites count views very differently. For example, a “view” on Twitter is a “click” on the video (Twitter’s autoplay feature is still in beta testing), a “view” on Facebook is 3 seconds, a “view” on YouTube is 30 seconds, and a “view” on Vine is watching the entire video (7 seconds). Beck questions how social media can count views so differently; rather, how can a view be measured as 3 seconds and 30 seconds? Isn’t this system inherently unfair?

Well, I would argue that yes, this system is unfair. Videos primarily shared on Facebook are likely to be viewed more. Considering Facebook has the autoplay feature for it’s mobile app, just scrolling through your news feed will result in many views – I estimate you spend about 3 seconds scanning the posts on the screen, so if a video autoplays, it’ll count as a view in those 3 seconds. Indeed, this works to Facebook’s advantage.

Facebook claims that it’s value is information. Facebook provides a media for advertisement. Many advertisers use Facebook videos to advertise their products. Facebook charges per “view” of the ad. So, Facebook has a large incentive to accumulate as many views on an ad as possible. Given that most people don’t voluntarily click on and watch a substantial amount of an ad, Facebook lowered the “view” length to just 3 seconds (or what I hypothesize to be the scrolling time for a “screen” of posts). Thus, Facebook generates many more views than YouTube, which measures with a 30 second view.

But why is this important? Many economists suggest that Facebook stock will crash quite soon. Advertisers are willing to throw money around when the economy is good, like it is right now. However, when the economy hits a rough spot, people are smarter with their money and will begin to question the true value of Facebook advertising. Thus, many economists suggest that Facebook stock is incredibly overvalued and unstable. Be weary of taking the risk to invest in Facebook, because a crash of Facebook stock may be inevitable.

Directly relating to Networks, Facebook is overvaluing the “quality” of a video link by increasing the view count through shorter view measurement. This means that these links can also generate higher “search-ability,” because they have more linking power and more views (or strength) behind them.

Here is the link: http://marketingland.com/whats-a-video-view-on-facebook-only-3-seconds-vs-30-at-youtube-128311

Note that this post ties Networks to marketing, economics, measurement, and accounting.

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