The Perils of Metrics

"In our analytics-obsessed world, it’s tempting to first ask how to measure whether something is a view, but if we take a step back and just ask what a “view” is, the answer becomes clearer. What is a view? It’s when someone watches the video. And Facebook counts views significantly before people could be said to be watching the video."

This is a very common situation: something that looks like a simple binary turns out to depend on setting a threshold on some continuous variable. At extreme values the choice is obvious, but the hard work lies in the ambiguous zone in the middle. Active users, time spent, retained users, ...

https://medium.com/@hankgreen/theft-lies-and-facebook-video-656b0ffed369