Tim Peterson says, “To paraphrase J. Cole, Facebook messes up on its math one time; shame on Facebook. Facebook messes up on its math a second time; shame on those of us blindly trusting Facebook’s math. Facebook messes up on its math a third time; time to make a list of all the times Facebook messed up on its math.

On three separate occasions since September, Facebook has disclosed more than a handful of errors related to its own measurements that brands, publishers and others use to evaluate the performance of their Facebook ad campaigns, Facebook-native videos, Facebook-only Instant Articles and Facebook Pages, as well as their off-Facebook mobile apps and websites.

To help myself and anyone else keep track of these errors, here’s an itemized list of each error Facebook has announced to date, a (hopefully) normal-speak explanation of what the error was, whether Facebook has corrected it or plans to, how it has/will correct the error and what impact the error had on the measurements Facebook reported.

Average Watch Time of Pages’ Videos
Error: Facebook calculated the average time people spent watching a video by dividing the cumulative time spent watching it by the number of views. But it only counted views that lasted at least three seconds, which set an artificial minimum for the measurement”.

FAQ: Everything Facebook has admitted about its measurement errors

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