Some publishers blame Facebook for destroying jobs with inaccurate metrics, but others say the industry should have known better

facebook ceo mark zuckerberg

A new complaint to a lawsuit against Facebook claims the social network significantly inflated a video metric that measured time spent.
Publishers are furious about the lawsuit and are blaming the miscalculated metric for forcing the industry to shift from text to video.
Between February and July 2016, seven major publishers like Mic and Fox News either laid off staffers or dramatically shifted from text to video.

Facebook is in hot water again with advertisers and publishers.

On Tuesday, a group of small advertisers that call themselves LLE One (and is made up of social media firm Crowd Siren, Social Media Models, and Quirky) added a complaint to a two-year lawsuit accusing Facebook of ad fraud. Per the lawsuit, Facebook inflated a specific video metric by 150% to 900% after reporting that the metric was inflated by only 60% to 80% percent in 2016. Moreover, the group alleges that Facebook knew about the error in 2015 and sat on it for a year before reporting it to advertisers.

Facebook has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and a spokeswoman said, “suggestions that we in any way tried to hide this issue from our partners are false. We told our customers about the error when we discovered it — and updated our help center to explain the issue."

But advertisers aren't happy. And neither are publishers.

Publishers raced to move from text to video

At the same time that the lawsuit was filed, Facebook’s newsfeed began prioritizing video over text and caused publishers that were heavily reliant on the platform for distribution to switch their strategies from written articles to videos. Between April 2016 and August 2017, at least seven major publishers — including Mic, Fox News and Bleacher Report — vowed to ramp up their video efforts by cutting down on text articles, according to Nieman Lab's reporting.

Millennial-minded Mic laid off 25 staffers from its news and editorial departments amid a larger reorganization of the company in 2017. In a memo, founder Chris Altchek acknowledged that the publisher needed to switch gears from text to visual stories. "We made these tough decisions because we believe deeply in our vision to make Mic the leader in visual journalism and we need to focus the company to deliver on our mission," he wrote.

Now publishers are fired up again and say that Facebook’s mistake with video metrics means that the company is largely responsible for layoffs and a massive challenging shift from text to video journalism.

the ‘pivot to video’ debate around Facebook and it’s overstated numbers - for news organizations that switched to video , it was either desperation at a desperate time, or a lack of strategic insight into what audiences actually wanted - (irrespective of FB pressure)
— emily bell (@emilybell) October 18, 2018

This is especially maddening because the “pivot to video” is not, as this proves, necessarily a consumer-led initiative. This is more likely behavior being forced on us by pressure from advertisers who prefer video ads to avoid ad-blockers and guarantee viewability. https://t.co/NKgTf7P6qG
— Phillip Picardi (@pfpicardi) October 17, 2018

I'm well acquainted with video, building video code, and building video metrics & this doesn't surprise me in the least. At previous gigs, I spent years calling bullshit on video as a strategy internally. The numbers I saw with my own tools never matched what was promised https://t.co/UBXYSfBfsD
— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) October 17, 2018

For former Gizmodo Media and News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti, this is just another instance of how media companies jumped in feet first after being seduced by the scale of Facebook's audience, and forgot that the social-media platform isn't really there to help with their business models.

"There is a reason these platforms offer 'launch' partnerships and often money to attract the creation of a new type of content they don't have enough of — video in this case," he said. "And smart media companies should take that subsidy, but just not assume that it will turn into a business model. This is simply more evidence of that and for some, too late, post their pivot."

Facebook is a double-edged sword for digital publishers

But not all publishers are pointing their fingers at Facebook. After all, the platform helped build digital brands from scratch.

A BuzzFeed exec pointed out that while there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea that Facebook was unreliable, publishers have indeed been able to build successful businesses on the back of the platform. The metrics, this executive said, are more of an advertiser headache. The truth of that matter is that publishers did still make ad revenue from the individual videos they published, the executive said.

Take Tasty, Nifty, or Goodful, for example. BuzzFeed's food, do-it-yourself and health and wellness brands have relied on Facebook, including video, to build successful e-commerce brands.

"We’ve built real businesses on the lifestyle end, so Facebook has translated very well into the commerce business," the executive said.

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