Retweet and follower counts on Twitter are about to get a new metric to help gauge their popularity. Recently, some users have begun to see a view count next to the duration length of their videos on Twitter.
“As video consumption continues to increase on Twitter, we are constantly experimenting with ways to provide a rich video experience,” a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable in an email. “View counts provide helpful context on the popularity of a video, and we are exploring this feature to help surface the best content.”
Although Twitter’s millions of users have not able to see how many times someone watched their latest selfie video, Twitter has been sharing viewer counts for other popular video content. Following the conclusion of the social media service’s first year of live-streaming Thursday night NFL games, Twitter reported the average audience size per minute for each game was roughly 250,000.
This year is already shaping to feature a few more ambitious initiatives in video. The company debuted live viewing of interactive 360-degree video during the last week of 2016. Twitter also recently signed a deal with European broadcaster Sky Sports to live-stream coverage of “Deadline Day”– the last day for soccer players to transfer to new teams.
In recent years, Twitter has used its video platform to attract ad dollars, even having select promoted videos automatically be at the top of users’ news feeds last year. The microblogging phenomenon has had its share of video issues as of late. Late last year, Twitter discovered a technical bug in an Android app update that inflated video ad metrics by as much as 35 percent.
There is no word on when the video view count will be pushed out to all users.
