Instagram to roll out view counts for videos

In order to provide a better engagement measurement to video creators and marketers, social networking giant Facebook's photo and video-sharing app Instagram has announced to launch a video view count feature.

"Companies like Gold's Gym used Boomerang to make muscles flex, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment ran a Marquee ad showing three videos throughout the day promoting its release of 'Furious 7', and small business 'Out of Print' ran a stop motion video ad to drive holiday sales," said a blog post.

The new feature, which will be rolled out in "the coming weeks", will give creators a tally of the impressions a video has received, whereas likes could be viewed as an engagement metric, VentureBeat reported.

Instagram said that in the past six months, the amount of time people spent watching videos on the service has increased by more than 40 percent.

With this feature, the users will be able to see the number of views and also how many people have liked and commented on a video.

The feature will be available as part of Instagram's version 7.16 on iOS and Android.

Twitter-owned Vine is already offering this feature.