Facebook inflated video viewing times for two years

Ad agencies voice concern as average viewing time is a key metric in deciding where to spend money online

Facebook has admitted inflating the average time people spend watching videos for two years by failing to count people who watched for less than 3 seconds.

According to the Wall Street Journal, ad agencies were first alerted to the problem when Facebook wrote a post in its Advertiser Help Centre saying it was introducing a new metric measuring time watched after realising that its previous measure only counting views lasting more than 3 seconds, the time a video must be seen to count as a view.