Announcing the 2022 State of Video Report

After studying video data trends over the last few years, it’s clear the dramatic increases in video creation and consumption initiated by the pandemic are here to stay. Brands, and their audiences, have one resounding message: We love video — and we want more of it!

To bring you our 2022 State of Video Report, we analyzed user data from over 330,000 Wistia accounts and over 42 million videos uploaded to our platform from 2019–2021. Our report explores trends in video creation and audience consumption, how brands plan to invest in video this year, and much more.

We also surveyed over 600 customers to find out how they’re thinking about video content and planning their video marketing strategy for the upcoming year. Dive into the findings from our customer insights in a downloadable PDF that uncovers how folks define video success, the types of videos they’ve created in the past, as well as their budget plans for the future.

Needless to say, our 2022 State of Video Report is chock-full of information you can use to inform your own business’s video strategy. Here are just a few of our favorite takeaways!

Audience demand for video content outpaced creation efforts

The amount of video people consumed continued to skyrocket in 2021, indicating that viewers’ desire for great videos is only increasing. We looked at video plays and total minutes watched and compared that against the total number of videos uploaded.

We clocked 14.6 billion minutes of video watched this year. That’s up from 12.2 billion in 2020, and up 121% from 2019! The two graphs above offer a key takeaway: Even though slightly fewer videos were created in 2021, demand for video content was at an all-time high.

Video consumption outpaced actual content created as businesses grappled with producing more video in remote-first environments. We see a huge opportunity for marketers to engage audiences with new content to meet existing demand in the year to come.

Videos with lead-gen elements converted more

Video can be an impactful part of your growth strategy, and we wanted to see how video marketing helped companies grow. We looked at how video was used to capture leads, encourage repeat visits, and bring viewers into marketing automation workflows.

Though full-screen Calls to Action (CTAs) remain the most common Wistia growth tool used by businesses, we noticed an uptick in videos using Annotation Links. This suggests that companies are opting to use video to nurture customers down the funnel in less obtrusive ways.

We also looked at a number of ways businesses customized Turnstile lead-gen forms last year to see how those changes affected conversion rate.

Most Turnstile forms are still being placed at the beginning of videos; however, 2021 saw an increase in the number of Turnstile forms placed in the middle of videos. This means more folks are allowing viewers to preview content before gating it with a form.

However, mid-video placement was actually the least effective for 2021, which saw conversion rates of Turnstiles at the beginning and end of videos increase significantly.

Brands will invest more in video — and take new risks — in 2022

Pretty fascinating insights, right? Based on our customer survey, we found that folks are ramping up video efforts in 2022, increasing production budgets, and focusing more on experimentation. We think businesses will lean into what’s worked over the past two years while testing things like live formats and branded series.