I didn't know Facebook _advised_ publishers to pivot to video? I thought that trend started with publishers themselves noticing that video had better engagement?
They overstated the average time that video was viewed in the newsfeed by only counting views of at least 3 seconds in the denominator of the average, but counting views of less than that in the numerator [0]:
> About a month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed. The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of “views” of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake seriously.
So advertisers, who had believed that video content had high engagement due to the misleading statistics, and so made business decisions based on that (laying off writers in favor of video producers), saw video view times drop 60%-80% after the fix, because the view time was inflated by all the 0.5s-1s views initiated while users were scrolling past videos and not really watching them. This was corrected in 2016 though, but perhaps many news sites, and society in general, are still feeling the effects of writing being deemphasized in favor of video.
