Read: People aren’t watching Facebook videos as much as Facebook said

Starting in 2014, Facebook began to report enormous video-viewership numbers, a feat made possible by its newly alleged inflation of metrics, and also through the company’s conscious decision to show more videos to users. This sudden surfeit of attention was attractive to media companies, and especially to those funded by venture capitalists, who often demand fast-growing traffic numbers. But producing video requires more time and resources than writing words, so most companies had to cut jobs in other areas to allocate new resources to the platform.

Around this time, Facebook also began favoring videos uploaded to its service over links to other video sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo. This effectively forced outlets that already had video departments into uploading their films to Facebook and playing by the social giant’s rules. Then, in August 2015, it debuted Facebook Live, a feature that first let celebrities—and eventually everyone else—stream live video from their mobile phone.

A few Live videos became enormous successes, and the media’s own coverage of them—coupled with its undying hope for a technological savior—helped fan the hype. When 800,000 people watched a pair of BuzzFeed staffers explode a watermelon on April 8, 2016, Mashable reported that the stunt earned “significantly more viewers than were turned into all of cable news in the United States.” Wired, meanwhile, listed seven TV shows with fewer viewers than the exploding watermelon, including HBO’s Girls. But the comparison was inapt: A U.S.-based Nielsen viewer watching TV is just not the same as an anonymous Facebook user, who could be anywhere on the globe, dipping in and out of a viral video on Facebook’s News Feed. In any case, BuzzFeed never repeated its success. But that didn’t stop reporters from being taken off the line of duty, while a promotional video of water being poured on permeable concrete racked up 100 million views.

Yet even before the latest revelation, it was obvious that Facebook’s video metrics were not comparable to industry standards. Facebook defined a “view” as someone watching something for any longer than three seconds. YouTube, the company’s main competitor, defined a view as 30 seconds or more. From a retail perspective, this was like counting window shoppers as consumers. It “fundamentally devalues the number-one metric of online video,” the YouTuber Hank Green wrote in August 2015, discussing view counts. “Ad agencies and brands are confused enough without Facebook muddying the waters by calling something a view when it is in no way a measure of viewership.”

Of course, muddying the waters in this way was also useful for media companies looking to sell growth stories to investors. “There’s that sense that not all of these digital news start-ups will see continuing hockey-stick-like growth,” Ken Doctor, a principal analyst at the analytics firm Outsell, told Digiday in 2016. “Fall behind in growth, and the current value of these companies may plummet; it’s a momentum game, win or lose.”