Facebook Agrees Settlement over Inflated Video Metrics

Facebook has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the alleged inflation of its video audience metrics by anything up to 900%. Terms of the deal, which has yet to be approved by a judge, are not known at this point.

Papers filed with U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California on behalf of a number of marketing agencies last Wednesday say the settlement follows mediation in April, and two months of further negotiations - according to www.mediapost.com .

Well before the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up, Facebook endured a year of adverse publicity in 2016 when various of its statistics for advertisers were found wanting. The current dispute was launched in the last week of October by three advertisers, Tom Letizia, Mark Fierro and Greg Agustin, who claimed the company 'induced' them to purchase video ads, and at a higher price, by inflating the average time spent watching video ads by between 60 and 80%. Facebook had owned up to the mistake in September, but said billing would not be affected as decisions to advertise had not been based on the stats in question. The plaintiffs later filed an amendment stating that documents obtained from Facebook showed that in fact its average viewership metrics were inflated by a much higher amount, anything from 150-900%. At the time, they stated: 'Facebook either knew that the average viewership metrics it was reporting ... [were] false or reported those metrics recklessly and without regard for their truth. The persistence of Facebook's false metrics was possible only because Facebook did not take verification of its metrics seriously, severely understaffed the engineering team in charge of fixing errors, did not fully investigate or correct errors that were reported to it, and refused to allow third-party verification of its metrics'.

Last week, the social media giant launched a reward-based market research app called Study from Facebook, through which users can sell data on how they use competitors' apps.