LinkedIn has displaced YouTube as the platform most businesses use to share video, according to the 2026 State of Video Report released today by Wistia. The finding marks a notable reversal: just two years ago, the gap between the two platforms was far smaller. The report, which draws on a survey of nearly 1,000 marketing professionals and analysis of more than 13 million videos hosted on the Wistia platform, documents a broad shift in where B2B video activity is concentrating - and raises questions about how marketing teams are measuring the results.

LinkedIn's rise in B2B video

The headline number is stark. According to the report, 81% of businesses now name LinkedIn as their primary video channel. YouTube, the platform that has long anchored digital video strategy, comes in at 76%. That 5-point gap may not sound enormous, but the trajectory tells a more dramatic story. LinkedIn's share climbed 33 percentage points over just two years, a pace of growth that few channels sustain across such a compressed timeline.

Lori Davidson, Senior Leader at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, is quoted in the report explaining what distinguishes content that performs on the platform. "The videos that gain real traction on LinkedIn are ones people save, hold their attention to the end, share with a personal note, or prompt a genuine comment," Davidson states. The observation points toward a qualitative shift in how success gets defined on LinkedIn - not views alone, but active signals of audience engagement.

LinkedIn's data ecosystem reinforces the platform's appeal to B2B advertisers. According to the report, 81% of businesses rank LinkedIn as their top channel for sharing videos, 67% for repurposed clips, and 62% for paid video ads. That combination - organic distribution, content reuse, and paid amplification all concentrated in one place - helps explain why the platform has moved to the centre of many B2B video strategies. LinkedIn's Creative Labs research from July 2025 analyzed over 13,000 B2B video advertisements and found that 73% of video completions depend on creative decisions rather than production budget, lending further weight to LinkedIn's emphasis on authentic, engagement-driven content.

This momentum did not appear overnight. LinkedIn's BrandLink, launched in May 2025, enabled brands to place pre-roll video ads alongside contextually relevant content in feeds. The platform's VP of marketing told Business Insider at the time that total video viewership had grown 36% that year, with video creation growing at twice the rate of other post formats. Dreamdata's LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report, released in September 2025, subsequently found that B2B marketers allocated 39% of their advertising budgets to LinkedIn by the second half of 2024, up from 31% in the first half - a level of concentration that few platforms achieve in B2B media plans.

Social engagement overtakes views as the key metric

The shift to LinkedIn as a primary distribution channel is accompanied by a parallel shift in how success gets measured. According to the Wistia report, 22% of marketing teams now name social engagement as their top video success metric. That figure is nearly double the 12% recorded in 2024, representing the fastest-rising measurement category in the survey. Views, historically the default metric for video performance, are losing ground to indicators that signal audience response - comments, shares, saves, and reactions.

This matters for how teams allocate resources. When views are the primary goal, volume and reach drive decisions. When engagement is the target, the quality of the content and the specificity of the audience take precedence. The report frames the shift as a natural consequence of where business video is being distributed: social platforms reward content that sparks interaction, not content that merely accumulates impressions.

Kyle Denhoff, Sr. Director of Audience Development at HubSpot, is quoted in the report drawing a sharp distinction: "The balance comes down to intent. Content built for discovery goes on social, while content built for the buyer or customer experience lives on your site." That framing positions social and owned channels as complementary rather than competing, with different measurement standards applying to each.

For context on how platform-level dynamics shape video measurement in practice, Dreamdata's analysis of B2B buyer journeys found the average journey spans 211 days from first touch to closed revenue, with LinkedIn influencing 35% of new business deals across the customer data examined. Against that backdrop, narrowly tracking views misses most of what video content contributes to a pipeline.

AI adoption in video workflows plateaus

One of the more surprising findings in the Wistia report concerns artificial intelligence. After AI adoption in video workflows nearly doubled from 18% to 41% between the prior two survey waves, the 2026 figure dipped to 38%. It is a small decline, but it interrupts what had looked like an accelerating trend.

The report does not interpret the plateau as a retreat. Instead, it reflects a maturing relationship with the technology. Teams appear most comfortable using AI in pre-production - planning, scripting, and ideation - rather than for footage generation or fully automated production. The most cited AI tools in the survey include ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for planning and scripting tasks, while tools like Runway, Kling, and Seedance appear in production and post-production roles. Wistia notes that AI users are 82% more likely to offer subtitles in multiple languages and 50% more likely to use audio descriptions, suggesting that accessibility workflows are among the clearest practical benefits.

Bridge Waugh, Director of Content at Storyblocks, is quoted drawing a boundary around the technology's role: "The smartest teams use stock footage and AI to expand their options, but a human is still making the creative decisions." Kaitlyn Rossi, Creative Director at Storyblocks, puts it another way: "AI is best at providing a lot of starting points. Humans are best at taste and selection."

The hesitations teams report are consistent. Uncertainty about the accuracy or reliability of AI output ranks as the top concern, followed by fear of AI replacing human roles, concerns about data privacy, and a lack of confidence in how to use the tools effectively. Notably, 90% of teams surveyed had grown their marketing technology stack in the previous 12 months, yet only 17% said their tech stack meets their requirements - a gap that suggests more tools are not automatically solving workflow problems.

This pattern aligns with a broader industry dynamic. A Mediaocean survey published in January 2026 found that while 54% of marketers plan to increase AI media investment, 42% cite data quality issues as preventing broader AI implementation - evidence that interest in AI tools has outrun the infrastructure needed to use them reliably.

Video budgets cooling, distribution spending diverging

The Wistia data paints a cautious picture of where money is going. Only 49% of marketing teams plan to increase their video spend in 2026, down from 57% the year before. For 51% of companies, video budgets are flat or declining. The primary blockers, according to the report, are company size, resources, and cost - not a lack of ideas or executive buy-in. Capacity, in short, is the constraint, not will.

Yet the picture on distribution is meaningfully different. While overall video production budgets are cooling, 48% of teams are increasing their distribution and promotion budgets. Only 7% are cutting distribution spending this year. That divergence - restraint on production, investment in reach - reflects a strategic shift: getting more mileage from existing content rather than simply producing more.

The report quantifies one dimension of this: 76% of teams resize their videos for different platforms, with half doing so every time they publish. Repurposing webinar content is particularly widespread. Nearly 9 in 10 companies repurpose their webinar recordings into shorter clips, email campaign content, blog posts, and social graphics. On-demand webinar replays continue generating plays for up to 12 months after the live event, and a third of webinars are still pulling views three months after broadcast.

Bridgett Henwood, Director of Video and Podcast Production at HubSpot, is quoted in the report on the formats that have proven most reliable: "Our most reliable performers are step-by-step videos that teach viewers how to solve a problem or build a skill." Joe Glover, Co-Founder at The Marketing Meetup, adds that webinar attendance quality tends to be high - about 40% of registrants show up, and more than half keep the webinar tab active throughout, an attention level that the report describes as rare for any content type.

US digital video advertising revenue grew 25.4% to $78 billion in 2025 according to the IAB's annual report, situating the Wistia findings within a broader market that is still expanding at pace even as individual team budgets tighten.

Four formats dominating investment

The 2026 State of Video Report identifies four video formats that are receiving the most consistent investment: educational videos, product videos, social videos, and webinars. These are described as formats teams make most often and plan to keep investing in next year. Customer testimonials and podcasts are gaining ground, with podcast video production recording the largest single-year jump - up 29% since the previous report.

The consolidation around a smaller number of formats reflects the capacity constraints the report documents elsewhere. With budgets flat and production demand rising, teams are not diversifying into new formats. They are doubling down on what already works. Monthly production cadence has become the most common publishing frequency, with daily and weekly production declining - a pattern the report attributes to teams settling into more sustainable rhythms rather than burning through resources chasing volume.

The performance benchmarks included in the report offer additional texture on where video earns its place. On websites, videos longer than 30 minutes achieve a play rate of 37%, rising to 52% for content running longer than 60 minutes, compared to just 24% for videos under one minute. Homepage placement generates the highest play rate at 24%, well ahead of product pages at 15% and blog posts at 5%. These numbers suggest that audiences visiting a company's own website carry significantly more intent than typical social media users, which reinforces the dual-channel logic that several marketers quoted in the report articulate.

Implications for marketing teams

The combination of findings carries several practical implications for professionals managing video programs. LinkedIn's dominance in B2B video distribution means that teams not yet treating it as a primary channel may be allocating production and promotion resources against a platform pecking order that no longer reflects where professional audiences are spending time. Adobe's research published in February 2026 found that 40% of marketers struggle with video strategy despite short-form social video generating 55% ROI for B2B campaigns according to LinkedIn benchmark data - a gap that the Wistia report's emphasis on engagement over views may help explain.

The plateau in AI adoption also contains a message. The headline rate of 38% represents a significant portion of the market using AI in some capacity, but the hesitations teams report - reliability concerns, privacy questions, skills gaps - point to implementation challenges that are not resolved by simply purchasing more tools. The fastest-growing AI use cases in the report are practical and low-risk: captions, transcripts, and audio cleanup rather than full production automation. Teams using AI are more likely to publish multilingual content and accessible formats, which may represent more durable returns than headline use cases like avatar generation.

The shift toward social engagement as the primary success metric signals a broader recalibration in how video ROI gets defined. Views measure reach. Engagement measures resonance. As LinkedIn continues to expand its video infrastructure - B2B video marketing has seen ongoing platform investment since at least 2024 when LinkedIn launched CTV Ads - the platforms themselves are building toward engagement-based value propositions that align with where the Wistia data shows marketer priorities moving.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Wistia, a video hosting and analytics platform, published the 2026 State of Video Report. The research surveyed nearly 1,000 marketing professionals and analyzed more than 13 million videos uploaded to the Wistia platform, totalling over 79 million hours of content. CEO Chris Savage oversees the company.

What: The report documents LinkedIn overtaking YouTube as the primary video channel for B2B businesses, with 81% of companies now citing LinkedIn as their top platform compared to 76% for YouTube - a gap that widened by 33 percentage points over two years. It also records a plateau in AI adoption in video workflows at 38%, down from 41% the prior year; a cooling of overall video production budgets with only 49% of teams planning increases compared to 57% previously; and a near-doubling of social engagement as the top success metric, rising from 12% to 22%.

When: The report was released on May 1, 2026. The survey data and platform analytics reflect activity spanning 2024 and 2025.

Where: The findings apply primarily to B2B marketing teams globally, with Wistia's platform data drawn from the 13 million videos hosted on its service. The survey covered approximately 1,000 professionals, with additional qualitative contributions from practitioners at HubSpot, Storyblocks, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, and The Marketing Meetup.

Why: The findings matter because they document a structural shift in B2B video distribution - one that carries implications for where marketing teams allocate production resources, how they measure performance, and how they structure their relationships with AI tools. LinkedIn's emergence as the dominant B2B video channel reflects broader changes in where professional audiences discover and engage with business content, a shift that intersects with platform investment trends and performance data from multiple independent sources tracked by PPC Land over the past two years.

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