When we sit down with brand teams at our Fort Lauderdale studio to plan the year ahead, the conversation almost always circles back to the same question: what do the latest video marketing statistics actually tell us about where audiences are spending their attention, and how should that reshape the work we ship? After more than a decade producing campaigns for Nike, Coca-Cola, AT&T, the NFL, NBC, H&M, Calvin Klein, and SiriusXM, our team has learned that raw numbers are noise without interpretation. The right data points, read correctly, can rewire an entire marketing calendar.
This is our 2026 working file: the figures we keep pinned to the wall in our edit suites, sorted by what they actually change about strategy. Some of these numbers will surprise you. Some will validate what you already suspected. Together, they paint a picture of an industry that has matured past the question of whether to invest in video and has moved into far more interesting territory, including where to publish, in what format, at what length, and for which audience.
We have organized everything below into ten categories. Skim what you need, then look at the section at the bottom where we translate the data into a working playbook our video production services team is using right now.
The State of Video Marketing in 2026
Video is no longer the experimental line item in a marketing budget. It is the line item. The figures below describe an industry that has gone fully mainstream and is now expanding into territory that even five years ago felt speculative.
1. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool
According to Wyzowl’s annual State of Video Marketing report, adoption has crossed a threshold that essentially makes video table stakes. The remaining nine percent is largely composed of niche B2B verticals and very early-stage startups. If you are still debating whether to invest, the debate is over. Your competitors already did.
2. Global video advertising spend is on track to exceed $240 billion
Total worldwide spend on video advertising, including connected TV, social video, and digital display with video creative, continues to climb at roughly 11% year over year. That growth is not coming from net-new budget. It is coming from migration away from static display and audio-only formats.
3. 96% of marketers say video is an important part of their strategy
This number has barely moved in three years, which actually tells us something important. We have reached saturation on the question of importance. The interesting differentiation in 2026 is no longer about whether to use video but how strategically each team deploys it across funnel stages.
4. 89% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support
Audience demand outpaces brand output in every category we track. When our team meets with clients about their content creation services needs, the gap between what audiences want and what brands publish is almost always the easiest opportunity to capture.
5. Video marketing budgets grew 26% in the past 12 months
The average year-over-year budget increase reported by marketing leaders is the largest of any single content category. For context, written content budgets grew 7% and podcast budgets grew 14% over the same period.
6. 78% of marketers plan to increase video spending in 2026
This forward-looking number is the one we pay attention to most when planning capacity for our facility. It means demand for production capacity is going to stay tight through the back half of the year, particularly for premium and connected TV formats.
How People Actually Watch: Consumption Statistics
Strategy starts with viewing behavior, not platform features. The way audiences consume video has shifted dramatically since 2022, and the video marketing statistics in this section explain why so many brand playbooks need a refresh.
7. The average person watches 17 hours of online video per week
That figure is up from 16 hours in 2024 and 10.5 hours in 2018. Video viewing is approaching the upper limit of available leisure time for many audience segments, which means brands are now competing for attention against entertainment, not other ads.
8. 75% of all video views happen on mobile devices
Mobile-first is no longer a planning principle. It is a production constraint. We design vertical and square cuts as part of the original shoot plan, not as an afterthought in post-production.
9. Consumers watch an average of 84 minutes of online video daily
Daily consumption has more than doubled since 2018. That sustained growth is the single strongest signal that connected TV, short-form, and creator content are still expanding their share of total media time.
10. 92% of mobile video viewers watch with the sound off at least some of the time
Captions and visual storytelling are not accessibility nice-to-haves. They are the primary delivery channel for the majority of mobile viewing sessions. Every cut our team finishes goes through a sound-off review before approval.
11. 50% of viewers decide whether to keep watching within the first six seconds
The six-second decision window is a hard constraint on opening shots, sound design, and on-screen text. The conventional cinematic build is a luxury that mobile attention does not give you.
12. Average attention span on long-form online video has dropped to 1.7 minutes
Pure long-form is not dead, but the cadence has changed. Audiences will stay for 20 minutes if you earn each minute, but they will tap out at 90 seconds if the pacing feels lazy. We re-edit director’s cuts aggressively for this reason.
Video Marketing ROI and Conversion Statistics
Of all the video marketing statistics we share with new clients, the ROI numbers are the ones that actually unlock budget. Here are the conversion and revenue figures our team uses most often when scoping engagements.
13. 87% of marketers report direct positive ROI from video
That figure is up from 33% in 2015, which is one of the most dramatic shifts in any marketing channel in the last decade. The improvement is partially due to better measurement, but more of it comes from production teams getting smarter about format-platform fit.
14. Video on a landing page can increase conversions by up to 86%
The ceiling is high, but realized lift varies dramatically with the video’s placement, length, and integration with the page’s primary CTA. A 30-second hero video usually beats a 90-second one on a SaaS pricing page in our experience.
15. Emails with the word “video” in the subject line have 19% higher open rates
Even the suggestion of video lifts engagement upstream of the actual click. The implication for nurture campaigns is that video thumbnails belong in your email program even when you are linking to a landing page rather than embedding inline.
16. 90% of consumers say video helps them make purchase decisions
This is the figure we cite most often when explaining why product video belongs on the PDP, not buried on a separate page. Decision-stage video changes outcomes more reliably than awareness-stage video, despite getting a fraction of the budget at most brands.
17. Product demo videos increase purchase intent by 97%
The lift on purchase intent from a well-produced product video is roughly equal to the lift you would get from cutting your price by 15 to 20 percent. Most marketing teams do not realize they have a cheaper lever sitting unused.
18. Including video in a sales outreach email triples reply rates
For B2B teams, the personalized video reply is the single highest-leverage tactic we have seen in years. Cost per response drops dramatically even when production quality is intentionally rough.
Social Media Video Marketing Statistics
Social platforms are where most brands now spend the majority of their video budget. The statistics below explain why, and which platforms are pulling ahead of the pack heading into 2026.
19. YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users
YouTube remains the largest video platform on the planet by a wide margin. It is also the only platform where premium long-form, snackable shorts, and Connected TV co-exist inside a single audience graph. Our social media marketing services team treats it as the foundational channel for most brand programs.
20. Instagram Reels reach 2.35 billion users per month
Reels has effectively absorbed the legacy IGTV and Stories video budget at most brands. The platform’s algorithmic surface area for video has roughly tripled since 2022, which is why brands report Reels as their fastest-growing engagement source.
21. Facebook generates 8 billion video views per day
Facebook is the platform marketers love to write off, but the raw video volume tells a different story. The audience skews older and the formats lean longer, which makes it a strong channel for products with consideration purchase cycles.
22. LinkedIn video posts receive 5x more engagement than other content types
Native LinkedIn video has quietly become one of the highest-engagement formats in B2B. The platform also weights captions and dwell time heavily in its ranking, which rewards thoughtful production over volume.
23. By 2027, 82% of all consumer internet traffic will be video
This long-running Cisco projection has held remarkably accurate, which means the infrastructure of the entire web is now optimized around video delivery. Every other format competes with video for the same attention, bandwidth, and ad inventory.
24. Brand-produced social video gets 1.2x more shares than influencer video
This statistic surprises people because the influencer narrative has dominated for years. Properly produced brand content actually outperforms creator content on share rate when both are designed for the same audience. The trick is that brand content has to feel native, not polished into corporate gloss.
Short-Form Video Marketing Statistics
Short-form has eaten the world, but the short-form video marketing statistics that matter most are not about reach. They are about retention, intent, and the new role short video plays in the customer journey.
25. TikTok has 1.7 billion monthly active users globally
TikTok continues to grow despite regulatory pressure, and its US audience now skews well beyond Gen Z into the 35 to 54 demographic that historically anchored Facebook. Our team’s TikTok briefs in 2026 look very different from the briefs we wrote in 2022.
26. Average TikTok session length is 95 minutes per day
That number is higher than YouTube, Instagram, and Netflix per-session averages combined for the same demographic. The implication is that TikTok is not a side channel. For brands targeting under-45 audiences, it is the dominant attention surface.
27. 73% of consumers prefer to learn about a product through short video
This data point reshapes how we scope onboarding, explainer, and educational content for clients. The 90-second product walkthrough has become the standard format, replacing the three-minute video that defined the 2018 to 2022 era.
28. Short-form video delivers the highest ROI of any social format
For three consecutive years, marketers have ranked short-form video as the format with the strongest return per dollar invested. Production cost has come down, distribution is free, and platforms continue to amplify the format algorithmically.
29. YouTube Shorts now drives 70 billion daily views
Shorts has converted YouTube’s existing audience into a short-form competitor for TikTok and Reels. The cross-pollination of audiences across long and short formats inside a single platform is a strategic advantage YouTube alone offers.
30. 39% of TikTok users have purchased a product after seeing it on the platform
TikTok Shop and similar in-app commerce have collapsed the funnel in ways that traditional social platforms have struggled to match. The discovery-to-purchase distance is now measured in taps, not sessions.
B2B Video Marketing Statistics
B2B has historically lagged consumer brands in video adoption, but the gap has closed dramatically. The statistics below reflect how decision-makers actually research, evaluate, and select vendors in 2026.
31. 70% of B2B buyers watch video during their purchase journey
Procurement decisions over six figures now routinely involve buyer committees watching anywhere from three to twelve videos before contract signature. Most B2B brands are producing for the wrong stage of that journey, with too much emphasis on top-of-funnel and not enough on bottom-of-funnel decision content.
32. B2B companies that publish video grow revenue 49% faster than those that do not
This figure is worth pausing on because it controls for company size and category. Video adoption is not just correlated with growth. It is one of the cleanest leading indicators we have seen for B2B revenue acceleration.
33. Decision-makers spend 2.3x longer on pages with embedded video
Time on page is one of the metrics that flows through to demo requests and qualified pipeline. Embedding even a short product video on a homepage hero typically lifts qualified form submissions by ten to twenty percent in the testing we have run.
34. 87% of B2B marketers use video in their content marketing programs
B2B adoption now mirrors consumer adoption, which was not true even three years ago. The remaining gap is in production sophistication, not whether teams are publishing at all. Brands looking to upgrade often partner with our corporate video production team for that step change.
35. Customer testimonial videos have the highest B2B conversion rate at 23%
Among all B2B video formats, testimonials produce the strongest funnel performance, edging out product demos and webinar replays. The credibility of a real customer voice is still the most persuasive asset a B2B brand can put on its site.
36. 92% of B2B prospects watch video on their phones
The myth that B2B video is consumed on desktop during work hours is now genuinely a myth. Mobile-first capture and editing apply just as much to enterprise content as to consumer.
Video SEO and Search Statistics
Search behavior has shifted dramatically toward video, and not only on YouTube. The video marketing statistics below show why SEO teams now treat video as a core ranking surface rather than a supplementary asset.
37. Pages with video are 53 times more likely to rank on Google’s first page
The Searchmetrics figure that produced this multiplier is several years old now, but follow-on studies have continued to confirm the directional finding. Google’s preference for multimodal results favors pages that combine text, image, and video.
38. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine
Roughly three billion searches happen on YouTube every month. For categories where users actively look for how-to, comparison, or review content, YouTube SEO often produces more qualified traffic than Google SEO at lower cost per visitor.
39. Video can lift organic traffic from search engines by up to 157%
The lift is not automatic. It comes from properly tagged, transcribed, and structured video content that search engines can crawl and surface. Skip the metadata work and the lift evaporates.
40. Video appears in 26% of high-volume Google search results
Video snippets have become a fixture of the SERP for product, how-to, and entertainment queries. Brands not producing video are not just losing a content channel. They are losing real estate inside the queries their customers run.
41. 70% of YouTube watch time comes from algorithmic recommendations
YouTube SEO is increasingly an algorithmic discovery game, not a keyword game. Watch time, click-through rate, and audience retention on individual videos now matter more than title and description optimization in isolation.
Live Streaming and Connected TV Statistics
Live and connected TV have absorbed budget from traditional broadcast at a pace that surprised even the most optimistic forecasts. The statistics here track that migration.
42. Live video gets 6x more engagement than recorded video
Live streaming consistently outperforms pre-recorded video on engagement metrics. The format works particularly well for product launches, behind-the-scenes content, and Q&A sessions. Our live streaming services team has watched live event budgets nearly triple at enterprise clients since 2023.
43. 80% of audiences prefer watching live video to reading a blog post
The substitution effect is real. Audiences who used to consume blog posts as their primary information source now default to live or recorded video for the same content, particularly for product education and category research.
44. Connected TV ad spend reached $33 billion in 2025
Connected TV has effectively become the new primetime. Premium long-form video is now produced primarily for CTV distribution, with broadcast TV serving as a secondary outlet for most national brands.
45. 67% of viewers are more likely to buy event tickets after watching a live stream
For event marketers, the live stream is not a competitor to in-person attendance. It is a marketing channel that drives future ticket sales. This is particularly true in the music and entertainment categories where our music video production team works.
46. US live commerce sales are projected to exceed $50 billion in 2026
Live shopping was the format that everyone predicted would explode in 2021 and then visibly underperformed for two years. It is finally catching on at scale, primarily on TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon Live.
AI, Production, and Format Statistics
Production economics have shifted under our feet over the past 18 months. These video marketing statistics describe how AI, vertical video, and changing format preferences are reshaping the cost and structure of video programs.
47. 75% of marketers experimented with AI video tools in the past year
The vast majority of brands are now actively testing AI generation, editing, or enhancement tools in their workflows. The productive use cases are narrower than the hype suggested, but they are real. We use AI heavily in storyboarding, rough cuts, and asset variation, less often in final delivery.
48. AI-assisted production can reduce costs 40-60% for certain video formats
The cost savings are concentrated in specific categories: product variant videos, localization, social cutdowns, and B2B explainer content. Hero brand films and premium creative still require human craft from start to finish.
49. 51% of consumers can identify AI-generated video content
The uncanny-valley problem has improved but not disappeared. Consumer skepticism toward fully AI-generated brand content is high enough that the safer creative strategy combines AI efficiency with human-shot footage and real on-screen talent.
50. Vertical video has a 90% higher completion rate on mobile than horizontal
If you have not converted your mobile-targeted creative to native vertical, you are leaving most of your potential engagement on the table. The completion-rate difference is the single largest format variable in social video performance.
51. Captioned video earns 12% more view time on average
Captions are no longer optional. We caption every cut by default in our audio and post-production workflow, regardless of platform. The engagement lift more than pays for the additional production step.
52. 60% of brands plan to use vertical video as a primary format in 2026
The vertical-first shift is now planned, not reactive. Brands that built their 2024 and 2025 programs around horizontal hero content are restructuring their creative pipelines to lead with vertical, then derive horizontal cuts where needed.
What These Video Marketing Statistics Mean for Your 2026 Strategy
Statistics describe the world. They do not change it. What follows is the working playbook our team uses to translate the figures above into actual production decisions, and the patterns we believe will define the next 18 months.
First, video is now a system, not a campaign. The brands posting the strongest growth in our portfolio are running continuous video programs that produce 80 to 200 assets per quarter rather than one or two hero films per year. That requires a different organizational structure, a different relationship with a production partner, and a different way of thinking about creative reuse. Brands looking to make that transition often start with a branded content series as the spine of their program, then build short-form derivatives off the master shoots.
Second, format-platform fit is the new creative brief. The single most consequential decision in any video brief is no longer the script or the visual treatment. It is the answer to a more boring question: which format goes where, in what aspect ratio, at what length, with what end card? Brands that answer this question in pre-production save twenty to forty percent in post and ship faster. Brands that figure it out in post pay the cost twice.
Third, the production stack has shifted. Modern video programs blend high-end studio production for hero work, location capture for documentary and authentic content, and AI-assisted variant generation for the long tail of social and personalization. Our facilities in Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, and New York are increasingly configured to handle all three workflows under one roof. Brands evaluating video production in Los Angeles, video production in New York, or video production in Fort Lauderdale are usually evaluating whether their partner can flex across these modes, not just deliver one of them well.
Fourth, the talent pool has reorganized around versatility. The most valuable producers, directors, and editors in 2026 are the ones who can move fluidly between cinematic long-form and platform-native short-form without losing craft. The siloed structures that defined creative agencies for thirty years have not held up well against this reality. Our hiring at C&I Studios has skewed heavily toward people with this versatility profile for the past three years.
Fifth, measurement has finally caught up to creative. The era of “video is impossible to attribute” is over. Between platform-native measurement, multi-touch attribution, and lift studies that are now affordable for mid-market brands, there is no excuse for treating video as a faith-based investment. Demand the same accountability from video that you demand from search and email. The video marketing statistics in this post would not exist without that shift, and the brands acting on those numbers are taking share from the ones who are not.
Sixth, and this is the most important pattern we see: brands that build long-term creative continuity outperform brands that chase trends. The TikTok trend cycle is real, but the dominant brands on TikTok are the ones whose voice is recognizable across every video, not the ones who jumped on the latest sound. Continuity of voice, character, and visual identity across hundreds of pieces of content is the new brand-building lever. It is harder, and it is the work that matters.
If your team is staring at these video marketing statistics and trying to figure out what comes next, the honest answer is usually some version of the same thing: more video, in more places, produced more consistently, with sharper format discipline. The good news is that the production economics have never been more favorable for brands willing to commit. The bad news is that the bar for what audiences consider acceptable has never been higher.
Our team is happy to talk through any of these statistics in more depth, and to share the proprietary benchmarks we maintain for the verticals we work in most heavily. If you want to compare your current program against the numbers in this post, or want to see the kind of work we ship for clients like the ones referenced above, browse our recent projects or reach out to the team.