Facebook is changing its primary metric to ‘views’

Views will be measured not just on video content but also on photos, text posts, and more. When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the switch to views this summer, he said that having one consistent metric across the platform would make it easier for creators to understand how their content was performing. For reels, a view is how many times the video was played. For everything else, a view is how many times a piece of content shows up on a user’s screen, and if the same user looks at it multiple times, each instance counts as a view.

Meta has also added a view count to posts on Threads, saying it’s an effort to give creators more transparency into how their content is performing. While the metric is perhaps helpful for brands, it’s probably not that insightful for the average person — it’s one thing for Meta to tell you how many screens your posts showed up on, but it’s an entirely different thing to explain why that is.

Views have been one of Elon Musk’s pet projects since he took over Twitter, now called X. Like other methods of measurement created by tech companies, “views,” “impressions,” and other metrics are arbitrary, and as any influencer knows, they can change at the drop of a hat — platforms update and encourage users to prioritize different metrics based on what’s good for the business. And right now, Meta just wants you to keep scrolling.