Just what you’ve always wanted to do, “glimpse inside Facebook’s headquarters”! Except that does sound kind of cool when you imagine Facebook bringing in top engineering talent and talking about new product development. But no, Facebook kicked off their live stream video service today with the incongruous choice of an advertorial for actress America Ferrera’s latest film “The Dry Land.”
We watched it live, along with another 359 people apparently. And while the Livestream counter on the widget did oscillate, we snapped the above screenshot while being generous. The ratio of 360 Facebook Live viewers to 500 million Facebook users (1:1,388,888) is shockingly low, especially when considering how many other media outlets embedded the pretty snazzy Facebook Live widget.
There are plenty of good explanations for these meager numbers: There’s no one on Facebook late Friday afternoon, maybe there’s a bug, maybe you have to log in to your Livestream account to be counted as a viewer? If it is the latter login problem then the 360 number is still insanely modest considering the massive size of Facebook.
When asked why the follower count was so low and if perhaps the was some analytics mistake, a Facebook spokesperson offered the following statement (Livestream has yet to respond):
“We just wrapped our Facebook Live interview and are looking into all of the results but at this time we can say that we received nearly 3000 comments from people watching the interview live.”
Right now the feature is currently on repeat (looks like about 149 people are raptly paying attention). You can add to that number by tuning in here.
Another update from Facebook:
“We’re still working on pulling the analytics but can say the number you saw on the screen during the interview was not accurate. Also, we were not counting the embeds.”