If your 2025 marketing plan doesn’t center around video, you’re already behind. Video is the new language of the internet. In fact, video accounts for 82% of all global internet traffic. Consumers are watching an average of 17 hours of video each week, and mobile users are twice as likely to share video content. Simply put: video drives discovery, engagement, and conversion like no other medium.
Let’s dig into the latest video marketing statistics and insights from leading industry reports and a groundbreaking technical study by Akamai. This is more than trivia; it’s strategic knowledge every marketer needs.
1. Video Marketing Adoption: The New Normal
Video marketing is no longer optional; it has become the default in 2025. The explosive adoption of video across industries signals that any brand not using it is at a competitive disadvantage.
General Market Trends
- 95% of businesses report using video as a core marketing tool (Outbrain).
- 91% of marketers say video is essential to their strategy, citing its effectiveness in reaching audiences, driving engagement, and simplifying complex ideas (Vidico).
- 93% of marketers report video delivers a strong return on investment, particularly when paired with mobile-first and platform-optimized strategies (Wyzowl).
- 87% of marketers say video directly increases their sales pipeline and conversion rates (Vidico).
Video is Also Driving Cross-departmental Value
- Customer support teams are using video to reduce ticket volume and improve resolution times.
- Sales teams leverage personalized video outreach to improve reply and demo booking rates.
- HR and internal comms use video to increase employee engagement and knowledge retention.
B2B-Specific Insights
While B2C brands often lead the charge in creative video deployment, B2B brands are catching up fast:
- 87% of B2B marketers say they actively use video in campaigns, from product explainers and testimonials to webinars and case studies.
- 52% of B2B marketers report that video offers the highest ROI of all content formats.
- B2B companies that embrace video grow revenue 49% faster than their non-video-using counterparts.
- B2B email campaigns featuring video get 2–3x higher click-through rates.
Beyond revenue, video is becoming a trust-builder and brand differentiator in the B2B space. As procurement cycles become longer and more complex, video helps simplify messaging, humanize brands, and reduce friction across touchpoints.
2. What Works: Top Performing Video Formats
In 2025, not all videos are created equal. Consumers and platforms are gravitating toward formats that are fast, digestible, and interactive. Marketers who lean into these preferences are seeing higher engagement and stronger returns.
Short-form Dominance
Short-form videos—defined as those under two minutes—have emerged as the most effective video format across nearly every platform.
- 90% of consumers watch short-form videos every day (Upskillist).
- 73% of people prefer short-form videos when researching products.
- Videos under 90 seconds retain 50% of viewers, while videos over two minutes see that drop to around 30%.
- Short-form content dominates TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and even LinkedIn, where B2B professionals are increasingly consuming content in snackable bursts.
- Global ad revenue from short-form videos surpassed $10 billion, with forecasted annual growth still accelerating.
Explainer Videos
Explainers remain a cornerstone of product education and onboarding.
- 98% of consumers say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service.
- 87% of those viewers were convinced to make a purchase afterward.
- Explainers are the most commonly produced video type among both B2C and B2B marketers.
- These videos reduce cognitive friction, increase comprehension, and are often used on landing pages, product tutorials, or during onboarding.
Interactive and Shoppable Content
Interactive and shoppable videos are transforming passive viewing into active participation:
- Interactive video ads generate 10x more clicks than traditional linear formats.
- Viewers can tap, scroll, vote, or buy directly within the video frame.
- 70% of US retailers use shoppable video formats, seeing average conversion rates of 12%, significantly above static video ads.
- These formats are particularly effective on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even within in-app ecommerce environments.
3. Mobile & Social Platforms: Where the Attention Lives
In 2025, it’s not just about what you say in a video—it’s where and how you deliver it. Video performance is heavily influenced by the user’s device and platform of choice, and today, those choices are clear: mobile-first and social-native.
Mobile-First Consumption
- 72% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, a statistic that underlines the necessity of designing video content specifically for phones and tablets.
- 69% of video content is consumed on smartphones, making vertical orientation and mobile-friendly editing critical to success.
- Mobile viewers are twice as likely to share videos as desktop users (GoToMarket Alliance), creating viral potential that can exponentially increase reach.
- Vertical videos achieve a 90% completion rate—far higher than traditional horizontal formats—because they naturally align with how people hold their phones.
To succeed on mobile, brands are optimizing for not just screen size, but also bandwidth, scroll behavior, sound-off viewing, and thumb-stopping intros.
Social Video Dominance
Social platforms have become the default environment for video engagement, especially for younger audiences:
- 63% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials say that social media ads and reviews influence their purchasing decisions more than traditional streaming video ads (Deloitte).
- Gen Z spends almost 50 minutes more per day on social platforms than older generations, particularly on video-centric platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
- Over 50% of Gen Z and Millennials say they prefer watching video on social media compared to traditional streaming platforms.
For marketers, this means that platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels are more than just places to publish content—they’re ecosystems that demand platform-native strategies. Content that performs well on these platforms is short, authentic, fast-paced, and often creator-led.
4. Placement & Length: Strategic Ad Deployment
Akamai’s 2025 research study, based on 257 million video ads and 65 million viewers, uncovered critical insights into how placement, length, and content context determine whether your ad is watched or abandoned.
Placement
- Mid-roll ads (shown during content) lead the pack with a 97% completion rate.
- Pre-roll ads (shown before content) complete 74% of the time.
- Post-roll ads (after content) perform the worst, with only 45% completion.
- Statistically, mid-roll ads are 18.1% more likely to be completed than pre-rolls, and pre-rolls are 14.3% more likely than post-rolls.
Why does placement matter? When users are already engaged in content, they are less likely to skip ads. Especially if placed mid-way during a video they are committed to finishing.
Length
- 15-second ads are the sweet spot: they are 2.9% more likely to be completed than 20-second ads, and outperform 30-second ads by 6.8%.
- Ad abandonment is steep: 1/3 of viewers drop off by the 25% mark, and 2/3 exit before the halfway point.
- This means you should deliver your hook, branding, and CTA within the first 5–8 seconds, even in longer ads.
Shorter ads are particularly effective on social platforms and mobile, where attention spans are limited and thumb-scrolling behavior dominates.
Context
- Ads embedded in long-form video content (TV shows, webinars, podcasts) achieve an 87% completion rate.
- By contrast, ads in short-form clips (e.g., memes, shorts, TikToks) only reach 67% completion.
Long-form content creates a more immersive experience, which allows for better tolerance of mid-roll interruptions and longer dwell times. Partnering with premium content or serialized creators can be a smart way to deliver higher-performing ads.
5. Engagement, Accessibility & Conversion Tools
In 2025, the most effective video strategies go far beyond impressions or view counts. True impact is measured through engagement, accessibility, and conversion. Here’s how leading marketers are optimizing every second of their videos to drive results.
Engagement: Beyond Passive Viewing
- 82% of short how-to videos (under one minute) are watched to completion. These bite-sized formats are ideal for tutorials, product demos, and onboarding.
- Mid-roll lead-gen forms—appearing mid-video when viewer attention is highest—can drive conversion rates up to 65%. Viewers are more likely to submit info after absorbing some value.
- Video email campaigns can achieve 2–3x higher click-through rates than image- or text-based emails. Even including the word “video” in the subject line can boost open rates significantly.
Interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and clickable end screens are also gaining traction, turning video into a direct-response tool rather than a passive branding exercise.
Accessibility: A Growing Standard, Not a Perk
Making content accessible is no longer optional. It’s a best practice with measurable ROI.
- Captioning usage has increased 572% since 2021, driven by autoplay behavior on social media and the need for inclusive communication.
- Auto-captioning adoption spiked 254% in 2025, as AI-powered tools made implementation faster and cheaper (HubSpot).
- Nearly 50% of all published videos now include three or more accessibility features, such as closed captions, audio descriptions, transcripts, and keyboard navigation.
These features don’t just serve viewers with disabilities, they also increase retention in noisy environments, improve watch time, and boost SEO by providing text for indexing.
It’s worth noting that even as digital video advertising surges, television commercials still inform best practices around pacing and storytelling—especially in long-form formats. And for many top brands, video is now part of their overall strategy, not just a campaign-specific tactic.
