Twitter Tweaks Its Video Feature By Adding View Count Displays

Like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is also obsessed with video. The microblogging platform has started showing view counts on videos.

View counts feature is plainly standard. Video clips shared on the service will show the number of people who have watched, even if they watched it for a couple of seconds. This should encourage people to share more videos, if they find that their content is widely seen.

Twitter has never counted video interactions before, and this is why this is interesting. By giving a 'reward' to video creators, Twitter wants to make the platform a bit more appealing to users.

Media companies and publishers, for example, could also appreciate the public-facing viewership counts that point to the popularity of their videos.

However, advertisers won't benefit much. Most brands on Twitter are already enjoying a specialized Twitter data that provides view counts.

Twitter's video view count is according to Media Rating Council standards, which conclude that one view equals to 2 seconds of play time with at least 50 percent of the video on the screen. The counts however, won't be shown on livestreams or special even from media partners.

Other platforms have view counts feature, have their own definition of what considered to be a view. Most of them use the time in seconds, or in relative of the percentage of a video, based on length.

For Twitter, it follows similar lines to others, but for obvious reasons, it wants to present view counts which are as high as possible.

Previously, Twitter has made a number of tweaks and changes, including increasing of character limits from 140 to 280.