Video content marketing statistics for 2026 show 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool, and 82% of video marketers say it delivers a good return on investment (Wyzowl, 2026).

That single pair of numbers explains why video has become the default format for content teams, but it hides a more complicated picture underneath: adoption is near-universal while ROI sentiment is actually falling, budgets are flattening even as output rises, and the platforms winning attention in 2026 are not the ones that won it two years ago.

This page pulls together the adoption, budget, ROI, AI, platform, and search data marketers need to plan video content strategy for the rest of the year.

Quick answer: 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, and video marketers rank social media videos (69%) and explainer videos (68%) as their most-produced formats (Wyzowl, 2026).

Key stats at a glance:

• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026).
• 82% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI, down from an all-time high of 93% the year before (Wyzowl, 2026).
• 63% of video marketers have used AI tools to create or edit marketing video, up from 51% a year earlier (Wyzowl, 2026).
• 80% of B2B teams name LinkedIn their primary video-sharing channel, ahead of YouTube (Wistia, 2026).
• 94.6% of online adults watched some form of online video in the past 30 days (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview Report).

Video Content Marketing Statistics: Adoption and Usage

Video's adoption curve has essentially flattened at the top, but the reasons businesses give for staying out, and the plans of those who do, still move year to year.

1. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, back to a joint all-time high after a slight dip in 2025 (Wyzowl, 2026).
2. 93% of video marketers see video as an important part of their overall marketing strategy in 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026).
3. Among businesses that don't use video, 24% say they don't feel it's needed, and an equal 24% say it's too expensive, the two most common reasons cited (Wyzowl, 2026).
4. 19% of non-video marketers cite lack of time as their reason for not using video (Wyzowl, 2026).
5. Smaller barriers to adoption include unclear ROI (10%), not knowing where to start (10%), inability to convince decision-makers (5%), and a past negative experience (5%) (Wyzowl, 2026).
6. 67% of marketers who don't currently use video say they plan to start in 2026, down one point from the prior year (Wyzowl, 2026).
7. 59% of video marketers create their videos exclusively in-house, compared with 10% who use external vendors exclusively and 32% who use a mix of both (Wyzowl, 2026).
8. 51% of video marketers say live-action video is the type they create most, ahead of animated video (23%) and screen-recorded video (19%) (Wyzowl, 2026).
9. 69% of video marketers created social media videos in 2026, the single most common use case for video (Wyzowl, 2026).
10. 68% of video marketers created explainer videos in 2026, the second most common use case (Wyzowl, 2026).
11. 57% created testimonial videos, 48% created presentation videos, and 48% created video ads in 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026).
12. 76% of companies produce at least one video a month, a sign that video production has settled into a sustainable, recurring cadence rather than one-off campaigns (Wistia, 2026).
13. Just over a quarter of companies (26%) currently run a branded podcast, and 10% plan to launch one in 2026 (Wistia, 2026).

For a content team, the practical read is that adoption is no longer the question. The question is format mix: social and explainer video dominate output, live-action dominates production style, and in-house capability is now the norm rather than the exception.

Video type	Share of video marketers who created it in 2026
Social media videos	69%
Explainer videos	68%
Testimonial videos	57%
Presentation videos	48%
Video ads	48%

Businesses running a lean content operation shouldn't read "91% adoption" as a mandate to do everything at once; the data above shows most teams concentrate on two or three formats rather than spreading across all thirteen use cases Wyzowl tracks.

Video Content Budget and Spending Statistics

Spend on video is not falling, but its growth rate has clearly cooled compared with the aggressive increases of the early 2020s.

14. 46% of marketers allocate a third of their budget or less to video content, and 17% aren't tracking video spend at all (Wyzowl, 2026).
15. 92% of marketers plan to spend around the same amount or more on video marketing in 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026).
16. 41% of marketers spent money on video ads in 2026, up from 36% the year before (Wyzowl, 2026).
17. On the cost side, marketers are split: 30% say video production costs are getting cheaper, 32% see no change, and 38% say costs are increasing (Wyzowl, 2026).
18. Almost 40% of companies spent under $5,000 producing video content in 2025, while just over 30% spent more than $5,000 (Wistia, 2026).
19. 40% of companies expect to spend more on video production in 2026, while 46% plan to keep budgets flat, a share of "increasers" that has cooled since 2023 (Wistia, 2026).
20. 41% of companies spent under $20,000 on video promotion and advertising in 2025, and 28% spent over $20,000 (Wistia, 2026).
21. 48% of companies plan to increase their video promotion budget this year, while fewer than 10% plan to cut it (Wistia, 2026).
22. 57% of teams spend more time creating video than promoting it; only 20% spend more time promoting, and 23% split their time evenly (Wistia, 2026).
23. About 8 in 10 companies (80%) spent under $10,000 on webinars last year, despite webinars ranking as one of the most impactful video formats teams produce (Wistia, 2026).

The gap between #19 and #21 is worth sitting with: production budgets are flattening while promotion budgets are still growing for nearly half of companies. That points to more teams treating distribution, not creation, as their next investment priority.

AI in Video Production Statistics

AI adoption inside video workflows has moved from experimental to mainstream in the space of two survey cycles.

24. 63% of video marketers say they've used AI tools to help create or edit marketing videos in 2026, up from 51% the year before, the largest single-year jump this metric has recorded (Wyzowl, 2026).
25. Daily video producers are 58% more likely than occasional producers to use AI in their workflow (Wistia, 2026).
26. Teams that use AI are 57% more likely to produce 50 to 100 videos a year, and twice as likely to produce 100 to 250 videos a year, than teams that don't (Wistia, 2026).
27. AI users are 82% more likely to publish subtitles in multiple languages than non-AI users (Wistia, 2026).
28. AI users are 50% more likely to use audio descriptions for accessibility than non-AI users (Wistia, 2026).
29. AI users are 27% more likely to make product videos, and 52% more likely to make video ads, than teams not using AI (Wistia, 2026).
30. Among B2B marketers who use AI for content creation broadly (including video and image assets), 87% report improved productivity, though only 39% report improved content performance, the widest gap in the survey between efficiency gains and output quality (Content Marketing Institute, 2026).
31. 53% of B2B marketers report using AI creative-asset tools for generating and editing images, video, and other visual materials, the second most-used AI application after written-content tools (Content Marketing Institute, 2026).

The pattern across both the Wyzowl and CMI data is consistent: AI is clearly accelerating output and technical tasks like captioning, but neither report finds a matching jump in reported content quality or performance, which is worth flagging before treating AI adoption as an automatic ROI win.

AI adoption metric	Figure	Comparison group
Used AI to create/edit video (2026)	63%	Up from 51% in prior-year survey
Daily producers more likely to use AI	58% more likely	Vs. non-daily producers
More likely to produce 100-250 videos/year	2x more likely	AI users vs. non-AI users
More likely to have multilingual subtitles	82% more likely	AI users vs. non-AI users
B2B marketers reporting improved productivity from AI	87%	Among B2B marketers using AI for content creation

Video ROI and Performance Benchmark Statistics

Reported ROI for video dropped sharply this cycle even though usage kept climbing, which is one of the more counterintuitive findings in this year's data.

32. 82% of marketers say video marketing has given them a good ROI in 2026, a notable drop from the prior year's all-time high of 93% (Wyzowl, 2026).
33. When asked how they measure video ROI, 67% of video marketers point to video views, 63% to engagement (likes, shares, reposts), and 52% to leads or clicks (Wyzowl, 2026).
34. 40% of video marketers measure ROI through customer engagement and retention, 36% through brand awareness or PR, and 32% through bottom-line sales, showing marketers spread ROI measurement across six distinct metrics rather than one (Wyzowl, 2026).
35. 71% of people believe videos between 30 seconds and two minutes are the most effective length (Wyzowl, 2026).
36. 93% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service (Wyzowl, 2026).
37. 93% of video marketers say video has helped increase brand awareness, down from 96% the previous year and up from 90% in the 2024 report, a three-year swing worth watching rather than a straight-line trend (Wyzowl, 2026).
38. 85% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads, and 83% say it has directly increased sales (Wyzowl, 2026).
39. 82% of video marketers say video has increased both web traffic and average time spent on their website (dwell time) (Wyzowl, 2026).
40. 57% of video marketers say video has helped reduce the volume of support queries they receive (Wyzowl, 2026).
41. 96% of consumers have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service (Wyzowl, 2026).
42. 85% of consumers say they've been convinced to buy a product or service after watching a video, and 80% have bought or downloaded an app after watching an app demo video (Wyzowl, 2026).
43. 84% of consumers want to see more video from brands in 2026, a figure that has stayed within 8 points for eight consecutive years of the survey (Wyzowl, 2026).
44. 89% of consumers say video quality affects their trust in a brand, down slightly from 91% the previous year but up from 87% in the 2024 report (Wyzowl, 2026).

How video marketers measure ROI	Share using this metric
Video views	67%
Engagement (likes, shares, reposts)	63%
Leads/clicks	52%
Customer engagement and retention	40%
Brand awareness/PR	36%
Bottom-line sales	32%

How consumers prefer to learn about a product or service	Share choosing this method
Watch a short video	63%
Read a text-based article	12%
View an infographic	7%
Speak on a sales call	5%
Read an ebook or manual	4%
Attend a webinar	4%

The drop from 93% to 82% good-ROI sentiment in one year (#32) doesn't mean video stopped working; the same report shows leads, sales, traffic, and dwell time metrics all holding steady or improving. It more likely reflects rising attribution expectations as more teams measure ROI on stricter terms.

Video Length and Engagement Statistics

Video length behaves differently depending on which outcome a team is optimizing for, and 2026 data shows that split more clearly than in past years.

45. Videos on homepages, video galleries, and product pages get the highest play rates on a company website, according to an analysis of Wistia-hosted video placements (Wistia, 2026).
46. Longer videos drive more clicks on interactive elements: videos between 30 and 60 minutes see the highest click-through rate on in-video CTAs, with videos over 60 minutes coming in second (Wistia, 2026).
47. The shorter the video, the higher its engagement rate tends to be, though a 10-minute video with a lower engagement rate can still deliver more total watch time than a 1-minute video with a higher rate (Wistia, 2026).
48. Educational and tutorial videos top Wistia's engagement-by-format ranking; viewers watch about halfway through these videos under five minutes, and engagement holds up better than most other formats as length increases (Wistia, 2026).
49. In finance, insurance, and health and wellness industries, long-form videos of 30 minutes or more outperform short-form content on engagement, the opposite pattern seen in food, beverage, and retail (Wistia, 2026).
50. In software and technology, videos between three and 30 minutes perform best, consistent with audiences in research mode rather than discovery mode (Wistia, 2026).
51. Vertical HD (1080×1920) video uploads grew 24% year-over-year on Wistia's platform, while 4K uploads grew 16% and 720p uploads dropped 8% (Wistia, 2026).

Industry	Best-performing video length
Education	Short or long-form, as long as it gets to the point quickly
Finance, insurance, health & wellness	30+ minutes
Food & beverage, retail & ecommerce	Under 3 minutes
Software & technology	3-30 minutes

Platform and Channel Statistics

Platform hierarchy for video has shifted meaningfully for B2B teams specifically, even though YouTube still leads on raw usage across the wider market.

52. YouTube is the most widely used video marketing platform overall, with 82% of businesses uploading video there (Wyzowl, 2026).
53. LinkedIn is used by 70% of video marketers, followed by Instagram (69%), Facebook (66%), and webinars (56%) as video-marketing channels (Wyzowl, 2026).
54. TikTok is used by 40% of video marketers, while interactive video (31%), X (29%), VR (19%), 360 video (18%), and Snapchat (16%) are the least widely used formats and platforms (Wyzowl, 2026).
55. YouTube is also rated the most effective video platform, with 69% of marketers saying it works for them, ahead of Instagram (56%), Facebook (55%), and LinkedIn (50%) (Wyzowl, 2026).
56. TikTok is rated the least effective major platform at just 29%, behind interactive video (20%), X (16%), 360 video (10%), VR (9%), and Snapchat (8%) (Wyzowl, 2026).
57. 81% of B2B teams share videos on LinkedIn, and 76% share on YouTube, with about half sharing on Instagram and just under half on Facebook (Wistia, 2026).
58. Less than a quarter of B2B teams share videos on TikTok, the lowest of the major platforms tracked (Wistia, 2026).
59. 76% of teams adjust their video's aspect ratio depending on where it's posted, and half do this for every video they publish (Wistia, 2026).
60. Over half of companies repurpose full videos into shorter social clips; 67% of those teams post clips to LinkedIn, 49% to Instagram, 41% to YouTube, and 34% to Facebook (Wistia, 2026).
61. 60% of companies that create social clips use them to link back to their own website, making social video as much a traffic driver as an awareness tool (Wistia, 2026).

Platform	Share of marketers using it for video	Share rating it effective
YouTube	82%	69%
LinkedIn	70%	50%
Instagram	69%	56%
Facebook	66%	55%
TikTok	40%	29%

Where B2B teams share video	Share of teams
LinkedIn	81%
YouTube	76%
Instagram	~50%
Facebook	Just under 50%
TikTok	Under 25%

The two platform tables above come from different survey populations and that difference is the story, not a contradiction to smooth over.

Source	Figure	Date	Scope/method note
Wyzowl	YouTube is the single most-used (82%) and most-effective (69%) video platform overall	2026	Surveys a general mix of marketing professionals and consumers, not B2B-specific
Wistia	LinkedIn is B2B's primary video-sharing channel, ahead of YouTube (81% vs. 76%)	2026	Surveys 900+ marketing professionals plus platform-level data from 13M+ hosted videos, with explicit B2B framing
Wyzowl	63% of video marketers have used AI tools to create or edit video	2026	Broad "have you used AI" question across all video marketers
Wistia	AI adoption framed as "more than a third already use AI in their workflow, and nearly a quarter more plan to start soon"	2026	Narrower "integrated into workflow" framing, measured against Wistia's own platform usage data

Different survey populations and question wording produce different top-line numbers here; neither figure is wrong, but they answer slightly different questions, which matters if you're benchmarking your own channel mix against either report.

Webinar and Long-Form Video Statistics

Webinars remain the clearest example of a video format that performs differently live versus on-demand, and 2026 data quantifies that gap.

62. Teams rate webinars as the second most impactful video type for business success, after product videos (Wistia, 2026).
63. Among teams that host webinars, 46% go live at least once a month (Wistia, 2026).
64. About 4 in 10 people who register for a Wistia-hosted webinar actually show up; a mid-30% attendance rate or higher is considered solid by Wistia's own benchmark (Wistia, 2026).
65. Almost 90% of teams reuse their webinar content after the live event, most commonly by adding on-demand recordings to landing pages (Wistia, 2026).
66. A third of webinars are still generating plays three months after the original live event (Wistia, 2026).
67. On-demand webinar engagement typically lands between 15% and 20%, but webinar replays between 31 and 45 minutes see more than twice the engagement of replays under 30 minutes (Wistia, 2026).
68. Nearly half of teams include webinar recordings in email campaigns, and over a third embed them in blog posts as a repurposing tactic (Wistia, 2026).
69. Customer testimonial video adoption has climbed steadily: 17% of companies planned to make them in 2023, rising to 37% in 2024, 38% in 2025, and 47% in 2026 (Wistia, 2026).
70. Branded podcast adoption has followed a similar climb: 14% of companies planned to produce a podcast in 2024, 18% in 2025, and 21% in 2026 (Wistia, 2026).

Webinar length (on-demand)	Engagement outcome
Under 30 minutes	Baseline engagement
31-45 minutes	More than 2x the engagement of under-30-minute replays
Registration-to-attendance rate	~40% average; mid-30% or higher considered solid

The four-year climb in #69 is the cleanest trend line in this entire dataset: testimonial video adoption nearly tripled between 2023 and 2026, a far steadier rise than most of the AI-adoption or ROI-sentiment numbers above.

Video Accessibility and Search Visibility Statistics

Accessibility has moved from a nice-to-have to a compliance requirement in several markets during 2025, and that shift shows up directly in production behavior.

71. 90% of teams are already taking steps to make their videos accessible, with captions the most common starting point (Wistia, 2026).
72. New accessibility laws passed in 2025, including the European Accessibility Act, turned captioning and accessible video from a best practice into a compliance requirement for many companies operating in the EU (Wistia, 2026). The directive itself, according to Wikipedia, took effect in 2019 and set a harmonized compliance deadline across EU member states, which is why so many video teams treated 2025 as the year captioning stopped being optional.
73. AI users are 82% more likely than non-AI users to have subtitles available in multiple languages, and 50% more likely to include audio descriptions (Wistia, 2026).
74. The typical online adult now spends 18 hours and 36 minutes per week on social media and video feeds combined, time that increasingly determines whether video content is discovered at all outside of traditional search (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview Report).
75. Women aged 16 to 24 spend an average of 25 hours and 45 minutes per week on social and video feeds, more than any other demographic group measured (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview Report).
76. 94.6% of online adults watched some form of online video in the past 30 days, making video close to a universal content format among connected adults rather than a niche preference (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview Report). That scale lines up with broader mobile video trends, as data from Statista on mobile video shows smartphones have become the primary screen for online video consumption worldwide.
77. Video content sits within the same discovery surfaces marketers now have to optimize for AI-powered search, since 15% of B2B marketers currently personalize video content at all, the lowest personalization rate of any channel B2B marketers were asked about, well behind email at 85% (Content Marketing Institute, 2026).

Accessibility and search visibility increasingly sit on the same production checklist: captions and multi-language subtitles serve both compliance and discoverability, since caption text is one of the few ways video content becomes indexable to search and AI systems in the first place.

How These Statistics Were Compiled

This article draws exclusively on primary and near-primary sources: Wyzowl's 2026 Video Marketing Statistics report (its own annual survey of 266 respondents), Wistia's 2026 State of Video Report (its own survey of 900+ professionals plus platform-level data from 13 million hosted videos), the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 B2B Content and Marketing Trends report (its own survey of 1,015 B2B marketers), and DataReportal's Digital 2026 Global Overview Report.

No content-farm listicles, statistics aggregators, or the three competitor pages scanned in Phase 0 were used as sources, even where they repeated figures that trace back to these same primary reports.

Every figure above is dated 2024 or later; several 2023-dated figures appearing in competitor coverage of this topic were deliberately excluded or replaced with more recent equivalents.

Where two primary sources measured a related question differently (platform effectiveness, AI adoption), both figures are shown side by side with their scope noted rather than merged into one number.

This is presented as a first, rigorously-verified pass rather than an exhaustive 100-plus-stat roundup; a follow-up refresh could reasonably add platform-official data (YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok disclosures), Statista's ad-spend series, and dedicated video-SEO research once each figure can be individually verified against its own primary release rather than a secondary summary of it.

Review date: this page should be re-verified by March 2027 or sooner if Wyzowl, Wistia, or CMI publish updated annual reports.

Conclusion

Three patterns run through the data above. First, adoption has plateaued near its ceiling: 91% of businesses already use video, so the competitive question in 2026 is format mix and platform allocation, not whether to use video at all.

Second, reported ROI is softening even as concrete outcomes (leads, sales, traffic) hold steady, which points to rising attribution standards rather than declining video performance.

Third, AI has moved into mainstream video production faster than measurement has caught up to it, with productivity gains clearly outpacing reported quality or performance gains.

Going forward, teams building a video content marketing strategy should expect platform choice to matter more than platform count: LinkedIn's rise as the default B2B video channel, alongside YouTube's continued dominance for general reach, means the old advice to "be everywhere" is increasingly the wrong allocation of a flattening budget.

The teams treating video ROI measurement, accessibility, and AI-assisted production as one connected system, rather than three separate initiatives, are the ones the current data suggests will pull ahead.

FAQ

What do video content marketing statistics show about business adoption in 2026?

91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, matching a joint all-time high after a brief dip the year before (Wyzowl, 2026). Adoption has stayed within a few points of this level for several years, suggesting the market has largely plateaued.

Does video marketing actually deliver ROI?

82% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI in 2026, though that's down from an all-time high of 93% the prior year (Wyzowl, 2026). Concrete outcome metrics like lead generation (85%) and sales increases (83%) held steady, suggesting the ROI-sentiment drop reflects stricter attribution standards rather than weaker actual performance.

What is the best video length for marketing?

71% of people say videos between 30 seconds and two minutes are most effective for general marketing purposes (Wyzowl, 2026). However, optimal length varies sharply by industry and goal: finance and healthcare audiences engage more with videos over 30 minutes, while food, beverage, and retail audiences respond best to videos under three minutes (Wistia, 2026).

Is LinkedIn or YouTube better for video marketing?

It depends on your audience. YouTube remains the most widely used (82%) and most effective (69%) video platform across the general marketing population (Wyzowl, 2026). But for B2B teams specifically, LinkedIn has overtaken YouTube as the primary video-sharing channel, used by 81% of B2B teams compared with 76% for YouTube (Wistia, 2026).

How many marketers use AI to create video content?

63% of video marketers have used AI tools to help create or edit marketing video in 2026, up sharply from 51% the year before (Wyzowl, 2026). Adoption is highest among daily video producers, who are 58% more likely than occasional producers to use AI (Wistia, 2026).

Are companies increasing their video marketing budgets in 2026?

92% of marketers plan to spend the same amount or more on video marketing overall in 2026 (Wyzowl, 2026). Production budgets specifically have flattened, with only 40% of companies planning to increase production spend, while a larger 48% plan to increase video promotion and distribution budgets (Wistia, 2026).

How important are video captions and accessibility in 2026?

90% of teams are already taking steps to make their video content accessible, most commonly starting with captions (Wistia, 2026). This shift is partly regulatory: new laws including the European Accessibility Act, passed in 2025, turned accessible video from a best practice into a compliance requirement for companies operating in affected markets.