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Instagram now shows how many times your videos have been viewed

Instagram now shows how many times your videos have been viewed

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A crucial metric for Instagram's most popular creators

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Similar to Facebook, you'll now be able to see how many times an Instagram video has been viewed by the app's 400 million-plus users. Today the company is beginning to roll out view counts, which will appear below video posts where likes would normally appear. You can tap the view count to see the number of likes for each video. but Instagram says it's giving priority to views because "it’s the best way to show how the community is engaging with video." According to the company's blog post, the amount of time people spend watch videos on Instagram has jumped up 40 percent. "We are seeing wildly creative and engaging first-person narratives come to life on Instagram."

Video views won't really make any difference for everyday Instagram users like you and I. But for the app's most popular creators, it's a pivotal metric to see how their content is faring on Instagram versus, say, Vine or YouTube. "We think it's important to help someone like Zach King, who is getting 5m views/day, or Rachel Ryle, who is getting hundreds of thousands of views/video, understand the depth of ways people are engaging with their videos." It's also something advertisers are keenly interested in. Instagram registers a view each time any video has been watched for at least 3 seconds — identical to Facebook's approach. Today the company will begin testing view counts with some users before rolling out the feature to everyone over the coming weeks.