The battle for online video supremacy seems to be heating up. A Google ad executive sent a shot across Facebook’s bow today.
Google’s advertising chief Sridhar Ramaswamy questioned the value of Facebook video, when the social network counts views after only three seconds of attention.
“How many of Facebook’s video views are engaged views?” Ramaswamy asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco.
Touche? We emailed a Facebook spokesperson for comment and we’ll update this post if we get a response.
The battle has been joined in the last year, after Facebook started pushing more video into users’ News Feeds in June. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has said serving more organic video is intended to make the appearance of video ads seem more natural to people. Facebook hasn’t said how much it’s making from video advertising, but it is creating plenty of cover for video ads, reporting in April that it’s serving more than 4 billion video views a day.
But Facebook’s view metrics have caused some raised eyebrows. Video on Facebook autoplays in News Feeds and a view is triggered after three seconds of a user’s attention. YouTube, on the other hand, counts a view after about 30 seconds. Other video platforms have their own standards as we reported last week.
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