Since Elon Musk's takeover, Twitter has been pushing metrics. First came the public ‘view count' for tweets, and more recently ‘bookmark counts' were added. 

👀 A Missing Metric

But now, it seems the platform is removing one of its most significant metrics for marketers: Video view counts. 

Several users have reported that videos on Twitter no longer display the number of times they have been viewed. 

It's unclear if the change is intentional, or if it's another glitch. Twitter recently updated its video player to include playback speed and a picture-in-picture style mini-player. However, some users noticed the missing view counts more than a week ago.

📢 Advertiser Concerns

Yesterday, Mashable reported that Twitter had stopped showing video view counts on the iOS app and the Twitter site. Video views were still visible on Android.

Quoting Mashable: 

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… 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.

Image: Twitter