Video Marketing Statistics: 2026 Roundup
In 2026 video is the default medium — the format audiences expect, platforms reward, and as the data consistently proves, delivers strong results. Whether you're building a business case for video investment, benchmarking your current performance, or simply trying to understand where the industry is heading, these statistics should help to give you a comprehensive picture of where video marketing stands right now.
Last updated: June 2026
Video marketing statistics: Key numbers at a glance
91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 93% call it an important part of their strategy (Wyzowl, 2026).
Over 90% of adults watch online video every week, averaging 11 hours 39 minutes of viewing (DataReportal/GWI, 2025).
85% of people say they've been persuaded to buy a product or service after watching a video (Wyzowl, 2026).
YouTube Shorts now average over 200 billion daily views (YouTube, 2025).
63% of consumers would rather watch a short video than read an article or sit through a webinar to learn about a product (Wyzowl, 2026).
The average TikTok user spends around 1 hour 37 minutes a day in the app — more than on any other social platform (DataReportal, 2026).
More than 80% of marketers say video has directly increased sales, leads, brand awareness and web traffic (Wyzowl, 2026).
Instagram Reels generate roughly 200 billion daily plays across Instagram and Facebook, and account for about 50% of time spent on Instagram (Meta, 2025).
89% of consumers say a video's quality directly affects how much they trust the brand behind it (Wyzowl, 2026).
8 in 10 marketing teams now name LinkedIn their main platform for sharing video, ahead of YouTube (Wistia, 2026).
What is video marketing?
Video marketing is the use of video to promote a brand, product, or service, and to communicate with an audience. What was previously just one pathway among many has become the centre of gravity for most marketing strategies, and the adoption figures make that clear.
As of 2026, 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 93% of marketers describe video as an "important" part of their overall strategy. Of the businesses not yet using video, 67% said they planned to start during 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026).
That near-universal adoption reflects how audiences now behave. More than 90% of adults watch online video content every week, and 87.5% watch short-form formats like TikTok and Reels (DataReportal / GWI, Digital 2025 April Global Statshot). The average person now spends around 11 hours 39 minutes a week watching online video across platforms like YouTube and TikTok — more than they spend watching broadcast and streaming TV (DataReportal / GWI, Digital 2025 July Global Statshot).
In other words, video isn't a channel you can choose to ignore.
Does video marketing work?
The short answer, according to the people responsible for allocating marketing spend, is yes. More than 80% of marketers say video has directly increased sales, generated leads, and grown brand awareness and web traffic (Wyzowl, 2026). Alongside the sheer ubiquity of video consumption, that impact also comes from the way video shapes buying decisions. 96% of people say they've watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service, and at least 85% say they've been persuaded to buy something after watching a video about it (Wyzowl, 2026; Sprout Social, 2026). The effect extends to apps too: 80% of people have bought or downloaded an app after watching a demo video (Wyzowl, 2026).
Audiences also express a preference for receiving information this way. When researching products and services, 63% of consumers say they would prefer to watch a short video than read an article or sit through a webinar (Wyzowl, 2026).
Social media video statistics
Social platforms are where most marketing video now lives, and on YouTube — very often the anchor platform for marketers — the scale is easiest to pin down.
YouTube statistics
YouTube remains the largest and most established video platform for marketers, combining enormous reach with intent-driven search behaviour. It has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users — about a third of the world's population (Sprout Social, 2026).
Users upload more than 500 hours of video every minute, which amounts to around 720,000 hours of new content daily (Statista, 2022). By YouTube's own reporting, audiences watch over 1 billion hours of video a day (YouTube, 2017). Its total potential advertising reach stands at about 2.53 billion users, equivalent to roughly 42.8% of all internet users (DataReportal, 2025). Marketers have responded accordingly: 82% of video marketers use YouTube, and 69% rate it the most effective video marketing platform (Wyzowl, 2026).
Short-form has become the growth engine: YouTube Shorts now averages over 200 billion daily views, up from 70 billion a year earlier, as confirmed by CEO Neal Mohan at Cannes Lions 2025. In the UK, Britons watched an average of 51 minutes of YouTube per day in 2025 (Ofcom, 2025).
TikTok statistics
TikTok's ability to command attention is unmatched, and for brands targeting younger audiences the numbers are impossible to ignore. By early 2025, TikTok ads reached more than 1.59 billion adults worldwide — over a quarter of people aged 18 and above (DataReportal, 2025). And it holds that audience better than its rivals: the average TikTok user now spends around 1 hour 37 minutes a day in the app, more time than on any other social platform (DataReportal, 2026).
TikTok also leads on engagement. Socialinsider's 2025 benchmark study put TikTok's median engagement rate per post at 3.7%, up from 2.5% the year before, far ahead of Instagram's 0.48% (Socialinsider, 2025).
It's also worth retiring the assumption that TikTok is just for teenagers: adults aged 25–34 are now the single largest cohort, at 35.3% of the global user base, with the once-dominant 18–24 group having slipped to a minority (DataReportal, 2025).
And the platform has become a genuine news source — 1 in 5 US adults now regularly get news on TikTok, rising to 43% among under-30s, up from just 9% five years ago (Pew Research Center, 2025).
Instagram Reels statistics
Instagram's pivot to video is now complete, and the platform functions as a video-first environment with Reels at the centre of both its algorithm and its ad strategy. Reels now generate around 200 billion daily plays across Instagram and Facebook — roughly double the figure a year earlier — and Reels alone account for about 50% of the time people spend inside Instagram (Meta, 2025).
The shift is just as visible in the ad business: more than half of all ad placements on Instagram now run on Reels, up from about 35% a year earlier (CNBC, citing Meta data, 2026). The average Instagram user spends about 33 minutes a day on the platform, rising to 53 minutes among Gen Z users (eMarketer, 2025). And that attention converts: Meta's own research has found that 50% of people have visited a website to buy a product after seeing it in Stories (Meta/Facebook IQ).
Across the wider network, feed and video ranking changes in Q4 2025 produced a 7% lift in views of organic feed and video posts on Facebook, with the platform now surfacing over 25% more same-day Reels than the previous quarter (Meta, 2026).
LinkedIn video statistics
LinkedIn has undergone a quiet revolution to become the primary video channel for B2B, and the reach is substantial: LinkedIn now has over 1.3 billion registered members, with an estimated 310 million using it monthly (LinkedIn / Sprout Social, 2026).
In Wistia's State of Video 2026 report, 8 in 10 marketing teams now name LinkedIn as their main platform for sharing video, up more than 30% since 2024 (Wistia, State of Video 2026).
The platform's own numbers bear this out: LinkedIn reports that video viewership is up 36% year-on-year, and video uploads grew 20% year-on-year (LinkedIn, 2025). The engagement data supports the shift, if a bit more modestly than the hype suggests. In Socialinsider's 2026 LinkedIn benchmarks, video posts saw a higher engagement rate (about 5.9%) than text-only updates (about 4.3%), and video is the platform's fastest-growing format (Socialinsider, 2026).
B2B video marketing statistics
B2B video has its own performance benchmarks, shaped by the longer, more considered purchase cycles of business buyers. Google's research found that 70% of B2B buyers and researchers watch video along their path to purchase, with nearly half viewing 30 minutes or more during the process (Think with Google, 2014).
Webinars remain one of the highest-impact B2B formats. ON24's benchmarks put the average registration-to-attendance rate at around 57%, and on-demand replays now account for roughly half of all webinar consumption — viewing that continues well after the live date (ON24, 2025). Wistia found that on-demand webinars keep attracting views for up to 12 months after the event, and ranks webinars among the most impactful B2B video types alongside product and educational videos (Wistia, State of Video 2026).
Customer testimonial videos are the fastest-growing format in its data: 47% of companies plan to produce them in 2026, up from 17% in 2023 (Wistia, State of Video 2026).
Is video good for SEO?
Yes, though not in the way that many often-cited stats claim. Video rarely lifts a page's ranking on its own, and Google has been explicit that it doesn't treat "time on page" (also known as "dwell time") as a direct ranking signal. The genuine SEO value of video lies elsewhere, and it's well documented.
First, video earns its own space in search results. Google indexes video and can surface it as a rich result — with a thumbnail, duration and clickable key moments — when a page uses a dedicated watch page and VideoObject structured data (Google Search Central, 2026). That's additional, visually prominent real estate on the results page that text alone can't claim.
Second, video appears across a meaningful share of results. BrightEdge's universal-search tracking found video showing up in roughly 17% of mobile and 22% of desktop search results, with YouTube dominating those placements (BrightEdge, 2022), making optimised video a way into queries where the standard organic listings are already crowded.
Third, search increasingly happens on video platforms themselves. YouTube is the second most-visited website in the world, drawing around 28.8 billion visits a month (Similarweb, 2026), and serves as a primary search engine for how-to, review and product-research queries.
Does video quality matter?
For all the focus on speed and volume, quality remains central to trust: 89% of consumers say a video's quality directly affects how much they trust the brand behind it (Wyzowl, 2026).
Key takeaways
Taken together, the data points to a market at a strategic inflection point. Adoption is near-universal, but standing out is getting harder. A few themes run through all of it:
Video is the default. With 91% of businesses using it, there's no longer a real debate about whether to invest. The question is where and how.
Short-form commands attention; longer formats support the considered sale. Short-form drives the highest reach and engagement, while longer formats — webinars in particular — remain among the highest-impact tools for B2B lead generation and considered purchases.
LinkedIn has become B2B's most important video channel. A 36% year-on-year rise in watch time and its new status as the number-one platform for B2B video distribution mark a genuine strategic shift for anyone targeting professional audiences.
The ROI case is settled. With more than 80% of marketers reporting positive ROI and direct sales impact, and consumers consistently saying video shapes their decisions, the financial argument for video has never been stronger.
HOW WE VET THESE STATISTICS:
Every statistic presented here has been traced to a primary source, and linked.
