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Facebook videos will soon look a bit more like YouTube content with the addition of a counter, the social network announced Sunday.
Starting this week, videos posted to Facebook will include a view count, allowing both those who posted the content and those who are viewing it to see how many views a particular clip has received. The views will be shown on public videos posted by individual users and on company pages, according to the world’s largest social network.
It’s not clear how long Facebook will need to complete the rollout.
Video is becoming increasingly important to Facebook. The company reported Monday that since June, it has tallied over a billion video views per month. While that’s an impressive number, it’s still dwarfed by YouTube, which claims to have 1 billion unique users that watch over 6 billion hours of video each month. YouTube doesn’t provide exact views per month, but given those figures, it’s likely much higher than the 1 billion Facebook tallies.
Still, Facebook has an advantage over YouTube in one area: mobile viewership. The company reported Sunday that 65 percent of its video views now occur on mobile devices. YouTube’s video views stand at 40 percent on mobile, according to the video site’s statistics page.
The addition of video views is just the latest in a line of improvements made to Facebook’s videos. Last year, Facebook added an auto-play feature that would automatically start a clip as people scrolled through their news feeds. Facebook also tweaked its video rankings earlier this year. The company says it’s now working on a feature that would suggest videos to users after watching a related clip.
Facebook declined CNET’s request for additional comment on the news.
