Mike Shields

Facebook said it has uncovered several more miscalculated metrics related to how consumers interact with content from marketers and publishers, and simultaneously unveiled additional independent review of some measurements to calm unease over the social network’s data. The company publicly disclosed that a comprehensive internal metrics audit found that discrepancies, or “bugs,” led to the undercounting or overcounting of four measurements, including the weekly and monthly reach of marketers’ posts, the number of full video views and time spent with publishers’ Instant Articles. None of the metrics in question impact Facebook’s billing, said Mark Rabkin, vice president of Facebook’s core ads team.

AT&T executives say their proposed $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner would deliver innovation to advertising.

While ad industry executives love hearing such talk, they say it is unclear exactly what it could mean for them. The combination of AT&T and Time Warner would bring together huge amounts of viewer data with content, which could serve as a catalyst to make TV advertising a lot more targeted to individuals, similar to the way digital advertising is now. In addition, AT&T’s data from its 90 million wireless subscribers and DirecTV households could be leveraged to target people with ads across devices, including TVs, laptops and mobile phones, some ad executives speculate.

It’s becoming clear the World Cup is a hit on US television, judging from huge ratings for Sunday night’s riveting game between the US and Portugal. But if advertisers want an impartial estimate of how many people streamed the game online, they’re out of luck.

That’s because neither comScore nor Nielsen -- the two biggest companies in third party audience research for the Web -- tracked the online audience. While both firms occasionally provide timely data on online viewership for live events (like say President Barack Obama’s inauguration), neither regularly track that sort of thing.

That highlights a reality about the Web: despite how fast online video has grown over the last few years, and all the ad dollars that are pouring into the medium, there’s no third party measure of online video audiences either in real time, or even overnight time.

As Netflix -- and to a lesser extent Amazon -- see their streaming video audiences surge, is Hulu on the decline?

According to a new survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, perhaps. The investment bank has just released its fourth annual survey on the media, cable and satellite businesses which contains several interesting nuggets.

For one, Netflix usage continues to grow, based on Morgan Stanley’s online survey of over 2,500 adults, while its lower profile competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video is also seeing its audience swell quickly. Thirty percent of respondents reported using Netflix, an increase of 5.5 percentage points versus the 2013 survey. In contrast, roughly 18 percent of respondents claimed to be using Amazon’s service, a 10 percentage point-jump compared to 2013.

What particularly stood out against those increases was that usage of the free streaming site Hulu.com slipped 0.6 percentage points. That’s not a precipitous decline, but in this era of increased Web video consumption, to be even flat should be worrisome.

Other datapoints confirmed the trend: Hulu.com has fallen out of comScore’s top ten video ranking, and has seen its audience slip of late, at least according to Quantcast. It may be that the decision by some of Hulu’s broadcast partners, ABC and Fox in particular, to delay when they put their content on the site has made the site less appealing.