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In this week’s Rundown, we focus on Facebook’s video forays and how it’s not yet much of a threat to take TV budgets.

Facebook’s attention problem
For Facebook’s next phase of growth, the platform will need to crack TV ad budgets. Cue the pivot to video.

But Facebook’s first pivot to video, inserting videos into its News Feed, succeeded in driving huge numbers of “views” but not much money. The scare quotes are because Facebook has defined a view as three seconds. Leave aside the fig leaf of mobile behavior; Facebook has gone to a lowest common denominator approach to measuring views because it has trained users to scroll quickly through the feed.

That’s why Facebook’s initial video ad product for video publishers, mid-roll ads that appear after 20 seconds, has been mostly a flop. Digiday’s Sahil Patel reported this week on the “pivot to pennies” seen by many publishers running Facebook mid-roll ads. The CPMs are pretty terrible (15-75 cents), but more than that, Facebook only monetizes a fraction of views. Again, that’s because Facebook’s own product works against people spending much time on, well, just about anything. The feed has given everyone ADD

The hope now is pinned on Facebook’s Watch, a dedicated video tab with longer-form video. Watch has only been out for a month. Early results are promising in one sense. According to Sahil’s reporting, average view times have gone up from 16.3 seconds to 23 seconds. But then, you start thinking about how Facebook wants to challenge TV. That’s very little engaged watch time. TV execs aren’t exactly shaking in their boots about Facebook getting people to sit still for over a minute when TV does the same over an hour. It reminds me of Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan’s point that a single episode of “Judge Judy” delivers more advertising to an audience than YouTube does in an entire day. — Brian Morrissey

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