Weather you show or not show page views very much depends on the type of content and type of users. Somethings that works great with mashable (i love it) doesn't have to work in a different context / for a different audience. Authors however probably love seeing page views.
BUT for whatever type of page view presentation you decide – after my opinion it would be crucial to put the number page views always in relationship to time. A raw number is of course already some additional information about the article (and in some cases, like here on stackexchange that works very well), but what does it actually say about the popularity of the article? If you're planning to put up a "popular articles" page you will run into the problem, that older posts will always appear to be more popular then brand new posts. So at least you should think of calculating the page views per day.
Comparing articles on a page listing "last months most popular articles" would for example be already a bit more informative than the raw numbers, but again you'll run into the problem that articles written on the 31st will look way less popular then articles from the beginning the month. Putting the page views in relationship "per day" will on the other hand make the articles comparable.
And last but not least: displaying absolute numbers, be it "page views" or "page views per day", might be a bit dangerous because absolute numbers are really very "strong" – and in the end an absolute number doesn't really say much. The way mashable works very well, because the DON'T show absolute numbers – instead you can rather see how an article lives it's life through different stages. So with one look at the graph you know if the article is a lame duck, a shooting star, or a social media rebirth etc… What I want to say: even if you know the "page views" and the "page views per day" you might consider having a different, probably visual representation – or a metaphor for that number…
…cheers! +…