Ever since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, it's become clear that he's obsessed with metrics. In December of last year, he had Twitter add public "view count" metrics to tweets. Public "bookmark counts" were added to tweets in March.
But now, it appears that Twitter is removing one of its most important metrics: Video view counts.
Multiple Twitter users, including the author of this piece, have noticed that videos on Twitter are no longer displaying how many times they've been viewed. This metric was previously publicly available to all users.
It's unclear if this move is intentional, as Twitter has recently updated its video player to include playback speed and a picture-in-picture style mini-player. However, some users have reported noticing the missing view counts more than a week ago.
As of now, video view counts have been removed from the Twitter for iOS app as well as the Twitter website. As of publishing, video view counts can still be seen on Twitter for Android.
If the video view count metrics removal is indeed on purpose, this would make Twitter the least transparent social media platform when it comes to video. Every other major video platform, from YouTube to Facebook to TikTok, shows its users how many views a video has received. It's also an extremely important metric for advertisers, as this helps them decide how to run ad campaigns on these platforms.
The removal of this metric forces users to depend on a different one that often paints videos uploaded to Twitter as more successful than the clips actually are.
As previously mentioned, Twitter does show "tweet views," but that's just the number of impressions on a tweet. As tweets are regularly recommended by Twitter's algorithm, users are often served content they don't necessarily have any interest in. If such a tweet has a video embedded in it and the user does not play the clip, then the tweet view count does not accurately reflect how many users actually watched the video.
A perfect example of such a discrepancy in these two counts can be seen on Republican presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis' campaign announcement video. The DeSantis campaign is boasting about 15 million views on their announcement video. But, that's the tweet view count metric. Android users, who are still able to view the more accurate video view count, can see that the actual video has only received just over 4 million views. (It's also important to note that Twitter counts a video view as just 2 seconds of playtime.)
Musk has centered video on the platform in recent months, as attempts to monetize Twitter via subscription-based services have fallen short. The company has been experimenting with bringing back its standalone live streaming app, Periscope. Last week, Musk announced that Twitter Blue subscribers could now upload videos that are up to 2-hours long.
Twitter's newfound interest in being a video platform has attracted some media properties, particularly right-wing media. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced he would be launching a show on the platform. The Daily Wire also announced that it would be uploading its longform video podcasts, featuring conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, directly to Twitter as well.
How well Twitter's pivot to video goes is anyone's guess, especially with the removal of video view counts.
