Tiktok, Facebook und Co wollen uns mit Fantasiezahlen beeindrucken
Wir sollten sie nicht ernst nehmen.
Ich dachte immer, unsere Kurzvideos bei Erklär mir die Welt gehen auf Tiktok einfach besser als auf Instagram oder YouTube.
Turns out: Tiktok zählt nur viel radikaler jeden Bruchteil einer Sekunde, den eine Person dein Video gesehen hat, als »View«.
Und YouTube beginnt jetzt mit seinen Shorts auch damit.
Taylor Lorenz schreibt in ihrem Newsletter:
Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were. According to a lawsuit filed against Facebook in California federal court in 2016, viewership metrics on some videos had been artificially increased by up to 900 percent. In 2019, Facebook settled the claim for $40 million.
Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.
After Elon Musk took over Twitter, he revamped its system for counting views, muddying the water even further. Some tweets from private accounts with zero followers amassed public view counts in the hundreds, leading many tech spectators to question Musk’s system for counting “views.”Last year, a reporter for The Post posted a tweet to a private, locked account with zero followers. Within minutes, the tweet amassed more than 700 views, by Twitter’s count.
“There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation,” Caldwell said.
Hier der ganze Beitrag:
