I’ve always said it. People like counters. The ability to see how many times somebody has viewed their website, photo, or video has always been interesting to everyone. That was the concept that fueled the creation of the free counter service here, and some part of what caused Facebook to introduce counters to shared videos.
A significantly larger part was the sheer popularity that Facebook videos have received. I’ll quote directly from the blog posts:
Growth in video views exceeded 50% from May through July of this year, and since June there has been an average of more than 1 billion video views on Facebook every day.
That being said it made sense to improve upon Facebook videos – and this is far from the first update Facebook has made. Over this past year Facebook has introduced auto-playing to videos, and changed the ranking algorithm targeting videos. Then there’s publisher tools such as Call to Action which Facebook has made available to further enhance their support for videos.
Keep an eye out for the update which is rolling out this week, and in the end will display how many views public videos from people and Pages on Facebook have received. Facebook has released an FAQ listing which will surely be updated once this update has rolled out to everyone.