Facebook celebrates 1 billion daily video views with new view count feature

As demonstrated by the infuriatingly popular #ALS Ice Bucket Challenge phenomenon, video on Facebook is more popular than ever. If you were in any doubt about just how popular these magic moving pictures really are, the social network announces that it is racking up an incredible 1 billion video views every day.

But have you ever wondered how many other people have wasted their time watching yet another video of crazy Russian drivers, drunken debauchery, or amusing animal antics? Wonder no more! Starting this week, Facebook is rolling out a new feature that shows how many views a particular video clip has received.

This is information that is going to be of most interest to whoever uploaded a video, but it's also a handy way to gauge the popularity of a clip. What? Only 15 people have watched that video? I'm not wasting my time on that -- I'll watch this hilarious footage with its 854,758 views instead, I think! The counter will start to appear from today, and can be found beneath a video preview next to the Like and Comment links.

There have been quite a lot of changes at the social network of late. When it's not trying to clear the crap out of newsfeeds, Facebook is busy helping advertisers pump targeted ads to users based on their connection speed -- and viewing information will be of particular interest to this market. Continuing its trend of not always getting things quite right, the social network introduced a feature that meant videos automatically played as soon as they appeared on-screen. But more recently, having faced criticism for its privacy policies, Facebook started to push a new Privacy Checkup tool which encourages users to double-check that they're not sharing information with too many people.

However, it is video that Facebook is focusing its attention on at the moment. The new view count will appear on videos from both people and Pages, providing they have been made public. If you don’t see it straight away, don’t panic -- it will be with you soon.