Publishers blame Facebook for layoffs caused by inaccurate metrics

Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
AP Photo/Marcio
Jose Sanchez

• 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 Facebook is largely responsible for
layoffs and a massive challenging shift from text to video
journalism.

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.

Take
Tasty, Nifty, or Goodful for example — BuzzFeed’s food,
do-it-yourself and health and wellness brands, which 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.