Forum Discussion
Surprise viewing stats for Stream (on SharePoint) video
On our homepage we shared a Stream (On SharePoint) embed video.
In looking at the document library and the file statistics we were surprised to see very very large numbers. Fantastic, we thought...
We believe the views figure being shown is the page load, with the Stream buffer not actual plays of the video.
The figure, we believe, is misleading - where do we get the actual proper having pressed play stats from?
This has also provided misleading data to within site usage too. A jump from ~5,000 to ~120,000
I've tested further by adding a different video to a new page and refreshed the page. No plays have been triggered but the video file is showing as having been viewed multiple times.
JWiersem1925 & prossum123 - The change was made and deployed toward the end of November. It doesn't retrospectively fix past view counts but changes how views are tracked for new views going forward. Instead of relying on if we fetched information about the video from ODSP it increments a view only when the player actually gets the signal that the user played the video for a few seconds.
This puts us back much closer to the way view counts were tracked for Stream (Classic). We do not have plans at this time to change the view counts to only happen when a user watches for X percent or to the end.
11 Replies
- Marc Mroz
Microsoft
Ray_Harrison - I believe this is happening because the view counts from ODB/SPO that we leverage are all based on when the action of "file accessed" happens. But the problem is that when we load our player to get it ready for a user to click play we are having to "access the file" to fetch info about it, metadata, etc. Thus you are seeing that just loading the player without playing causes a view count increment. We are aware of this and building a plan to address it. I don't have a timeline to share but we are starting to put changes in place so that you don't get a view count for videos unless you actually play it.
Marc Mroz Thanks for the confirmation. Is there a formula to use viewer retention % against the "fake" viewer count to get the actual view count? Or anything else that is possible in the interim?
- Marc MrozThere isn't anything I can think of yet. I'm asking the analytics team for more details on how the "incorrect" view count works and in what cases. (Sorry for the delay I was out of the office most of December).
