[laurihy]

Then again, if a "video view" is defined as "watched over 3 seconds (50% of the video visible in the screen, IIRC)", then it sort of makes sense that "Average Duration of Video Viewed" doesn't include non-views.

For sure Facebook should attempt to name their metrics as descriptively as possible, but also advertisers should make sure they understand how different conversions are measured, what's included and what's not. Another example would be "Clicks" metric, which included all engagement (i.e. likes, shares etc), instead of just "Link clicks".

[Naritai]

I thought about this as well, and concluded that FB must be reporting 'video views' as any time a video starts autoplaying (or something similar). In this way I could see the total estimated viewing time getting significantly overestimated.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

It doesn't seem all that unreasonable, yeah. If a user scrolls right past a video, should that really count towards the average?

[RodericDay]

A user below summarized the issue the way I understand it:

> what happens is that views under 3 seconds aren't counted towards the average. So if you have 999 999 views of <1 second each and 1 view of 3 seconds, the reported average is 3 seconds / 1 view = average view time of 3 seconds, while the true average is something like 500 000 seconds / 1 000 000 views.

This is massive fraud, especially if you're shouting from the rooftops "Look at how much more attention people are paying to your videos in our platform!".