Retweet and follower counts on Twitter are about to get a new metric to help gauge their popularity. Recently, some users have begun to see a view count next to the duration length of their videos on Twitter.
“As video consumption continues to increase on Twitter, we are constantly experimenting with ways to provide a rich video experience,” a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable in an email. “View counts provide helpful context on the popularity of a video, and we are exploring this feature to help surface the best content.”
Although Twitter’s millions of users have not able to see how many times someone watched their latest selfie video, Twitter has been sharing viewer counts for other popular video content. Following the conclusion of the social media service’s first year of live-streaming Thursday night NFL games, Twitter reported the average audience size per minute for each game was roughly 250,000.
This year is already shaping to feature a few more ambitious initiatives in video. The company debuted live viewing of interactive 360-degree video during the last week of 2016. Twitter also recently signed a deal with European broadcaster Sky Sports to live-stream coverage of “Deadline Day”– the last day for soccer players to transfer to new teams.
In recent years, Twitter has used its video platform to attract ad dollars, even having select promoted videos automatically be at the top of users’ news feeds last year. The microblogging phenomenon has had its share of video issues as of late. Late last year, Twitter discovered a technical bug in an Android app update that inflated video ad metrics by as much as 35 percent.
There is no word on when the video view count will be pushed out to all users.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?