Video Marketing Statistics 2026: 100+ Sourced Data Points

Video Marketing Adoption and Budgets

Adoption has been flat at a high level for four years. Wyzowl has asked businesses the same question since its 2016 edition: 61% used video for marketing then, and 91% do in its 2026 edition, the same as in the 2024 edition. The more useful signal is perceived return. In the 2026 edition, 82% of video marketers said video gives them a good ROI, down from 93% in the 2025 edition.

Budgets are holding rather than surging. Just under half of Wyzowl’s video marketers (49%) plan to spend more next year, and 40% of companies in Wistia’s survey expect to. In HubSpot’s 2026 survey, video marketing (37.1%) ranks third among the areas where marketers plan to increase investment, behind AI chatbots and paid social.

What Marketers and Viewers Say Video Delivers

Wyzowl asks video marketers what video has done for them. Most say it improved understanding of their product (93%) and brand awareness (93%), and smaller majorities credit it with leads (85%) and sales (83%). These are marketers’ own judgements, not measured lifts, and most of them slipped from the 2025 edition while web traffic was flat.

On the viewer side, 96% of consumers have watched an explainer video and 85% say a video has convinced them to buy. Claims that video lifts landing-page conversion by 86% or email clicks by 65% are not survey results of this kind; they are covered in the checks table below. For conversion figures with a traceable source, see our landing page statistics.

Short-Form vs Long-Form Video

Short-form video is the format marketers use most and rate highest. In HubSpot’s 2026 survey, 60% of marketers used short-form video in 2025, and 48.6% named it among the formats with the biggest return, ahead of long-form video (28.6%) and live-streaming (25.1%). Wyzowl’s respondents agree on length: 51% say 30 to 60 seconds works best, and 63% of consumers would most like to learn about a product from a short video.

On YouTube, Shorts now average over 200 billion daily views, and Alphabet says Shorts earn more per watch hour than traditional in-stream video in the US. Long-form still earns its place where intent is high: Wistia reports that videos of 30 to 60 minutes get the most clicks on in-video interactive elements such as calls to action. For a practical guide to producing Shorts, see our guide to YouTube Shorts AI creation with Veo 3.

Platform Data: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn

Reach and growth figures come from different methods, so compare within a row rather than across rows. Pew’s 2026 survey finds 84% of US adults use YouTube against 37% for TikTok, and 76% of US teens visit YouTube daily. TikTok’s own regulated count is 189 million average monthly active recipients in the EU, and Meta reported 3 billion monthly active users for Instagram in the third quarter of 2025, when video time there was up more than 30% on a year earlier.

In Wyzowl’s survey, YouTube is the most used channel (82%) and the one most often rated effective (69%), while TikTok is used by 40% and rated effective by 29%. Wistia’s survey of 900+ professionals puts LinkedIn first (81%), and Microsoft reported 30% growth in paid video ads on LinkedIn in the quarter to December 2025. Fuller platform tables are in our YouTube statistics and TikTok statistics.

Streaming, TV and Viewing Time

Video viewing has moved to streaming on the TV set. Streaming reached 49.0% of US TV viewing time in July 2026 on Nielsen’s Gauge, against 19.5% for broadcast and 18.7% for cable. YouTube alone took a record 14.2%, up from 13.4% a year earlier, and Netflix held 8.0% in May 2026.

The UK is moving the same way more slowly. Broadcasters still accounted for 53% of in-home video viewing in 2025, but linear TV viewing fell by 14 minutes a day, and 46% of in-home YouTube viewing now happens on a TV set. For advertisers, a connected-TV plan increasingly has to include YouTube.

Video Ad Spend and Revenue

Two IAB series measure US video advertising in different ways. The IAB/PwC revenue report, built from sellers’ reported revenue, puts 2025 digital video revenue at $78 billion, up 25.4%. IAB’s video ad spend report, built on Guideline’s agency billing data, estimates $73.6 billion for 2025. IAB’s spend report also splits the total by channel: social video overtook connected TV in 2025, at $28.2 billion against $26.5 billion.

Company disclosures show where the money lands. YouTube’s ad revenue was $40.37 billion in 2025, Meta says Reels runs at more than $50 billion a year, and Netflix’s ad revenue passed $1.5 billion in its third year of selling ads. Among the businesses Wyzowl surveyed, 41% of video marketers bought video ads in the past year. For help planning paid video, see our paid media services.

Production, Budgets and Costs

Most video is made in house: 59% of Wyzowl’s video marketers produce it internally and only 10% rely on an external vendor. Budgets are modest. Almost 40% of companies in Wistia’s survey spent under $5,000 on video production in the previous year, and 46% of Wyzowl’s respondents put 30% or less of their marketing budget into video.

Costs are not falling for most teams. More of Wyzowl’s video marketers say video has become more expensive (38%) than cheaper (30%), which gives no support to the widely shared claim that AI has cut production costs by 40%. For teams hiring in house, the median annual wage of a US film and video editor was $75,420 in May 2025.

AI in Video Production

AI use in video is the fastest-rising measure in Wyzowl’s report: 63% of video marketers have used AI tools to create or edit video, up from 51% in the 2025 edition. HubSpot finds 44% of marketers using video or animation generators. On YouTube, more than 1 million channels a day used its AI creation tools in December 2025.

Use is broad but early. Wistia reports that more than a third of companies use AI in their video workflow, mostly in pre-production. Buyers are moving too: in IAB’s survey of 360 US video buyers, 21% are live with agentic AI for video campaigns and another 20% are testing it. For the tools themselves, see our overview of the AI video market after Sora, Runway, Kling and Veo.

Video in Search and News

For a video to be eligible for Google’s video features, it must be embedded on a watch page that is itself indexed and performing well in Search, with a valid thumbnail at a stable URL and a supported file type. Google does not treat a page where the video only supplements the text as a watch page. The old claim that any page with a video is far more likely to rank does not describe how these rules work.

News audiences show where viewing is heading. In the Reuters Institute’s 2026 survey, 77% of respondents watch online news video each week, and in 45 of 48 markets more people now watch news video online than on broadcast TV. The growth is on platforms: video viewing on news organisations’ own sites fell 5 points to 23%.

Live Streaming and Webinars

Live video draws very large audiences when the event is big enough: YouTube’s first live NFL game drew more than 19 million viewers, a concurrent-viewer record for the platform. In commerce, live selling made up 14% of US TikTok Shop sales in 2025 by Momentum Works’ estimate.

Webinars are widely used: 56% of Wyzowl’s video marketers have used them and 42% rate them effective, and about 40% of registrants attend a Wistia-hosted webinar live. For attendance and conversion data, see our webinar statistics.

Forecasts and Network Traffic

Forecasts in this section name their target year. IAB expects US digital video ad spend to reach $81.9 billion in 2026 and to exceed 60% of total TV/video ad spend for the first time. Creator advertising, which overlaps with social video, is projected to rise from $37 billion to $44 billion. Netflix cut its own 2026 ad revenue expectation to about $2.7 billion in October 2026.

On networks, Ericsson estimates that video made up about 75% of mobile data traffic at the end of 2025 and forecasts monthly mobile data traffic to grow from 146 to 328 exabytes by 2031. It covers mobile networks only, but it is the nearest current measure to the Cisco figure still quoted as “82% of internet traffic”, which was a 2018 forecast for 2022.

Figures to Treat with Caution

Several video marketing statistics circulate without a source, with the wrong year, or with a source that says something different. Each one below is checked against the publisher’s own page.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below, each listed once and grouped by publisher type. All were read or re-read in October 2026.