Videos posted on Instagram will soon appear with a view counter below them, the Facebook-owned company announced Feb. 11.
The view counter will appear where the number of likes are normally displayed. Users will still be able to see the number of likes on a video by tapping the view counter.
“As a widely expected industry metric for video, we believe video views are the best measure of viewer intent,” reads Instagram’s blog post on the change. “And we often hear from our community they’d like to better understand how people are engaging with their videos.”
This is likely to be especially valuable for businesses, artists, and personalities who build most of their following on Instagram. Seeing the number of likes and views can give these users a better grasp of which clips resonate more strongly with their followers. Vine, the Twitter-owned video sharing app, has been offering a similar metric called Loop Counts since 2014.
Instagram also said the time people have spent watching video on Instagram has increased by more than 40 percent over the last six months. The company said more updates will be coming soon.
“Adding view counts is the first of many ways you’ll see video on Instagram get better this year,” the company wrote.
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