Make your video public on Facebook and learn how many views it has

People who upload a video to Facebook and allow it to be played by anyone will be able to see how many times it has been viewed beginning Monday.

As Facebook chases after the revenue that comes with video advertising, the incentive for users to make a video “public” could increase the number of Facebook videos that have the potential to go viral.

Many videos uploaded to Facebook have strict privacy settings that limit their access to friends or small groups. When people want to share videos with the public, they are more likely to turn to a place like YouTube. But Facebook has more active users globally than YouTube, and wider visibility of videos and the addition of viewership figures could make that more apparent to consumers and advertisers.

A Facebook representative said it would count multiple views by the same person.

If Facebook does get people to use its video tools more often, it could eventually place advertising alongside the videos the same way YouTube already does for millions of videos. For now, Facebook plans to get people who watch videos from their smartphones and tablets to watch more by recommending content when a video ends.

Analysts expect online video viewing, and advertising along with it, to go up.

The room for growth is immense because the amount of time U.S. adults spend watching online videos, excluding Netflix and adult films, adds up to only 4% of the time they spend with TV, according to ComScore and Nielsen data. But on mobile devices, no activities are becoming as popular as quickly as watching and sharing videos and photos.

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