37 reasons that video content is king

Bill Gates, in 1996, predicted “content is king,” Bill said content would revolutionize the internet because it “allows material to be duplicated at a low cost, no matter the size of the audience. When it comes to an interactive network such as the internet, the definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide.” Michael Eisner, in 1994, said businesses have to “reinvent themselves every seven years, as businesses mature and situations change.” These two statements make me believe, today, as Bill’s prediction still continues to come true, it has “matured” to be “Video content is king.” Here are 37 reasons why.

By the percentages:

1.  200% to 300% increase in click-through rate when marketers include video in an e-mail (Forrester)
2. 100% more time is spent on pages with videos on them. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
3. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco)
4. 90% of online shoppers at a major retailer’s website said they find video helpful in making shopping and buying decisions. Retailers who provide online video to show off their products report that the products with video sell a lot more than products with no video. (comScore)
5. 85% of the US internet audience watches videos online. The 25-34 age group watches the most online videos, and adult males spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than females. (comScore and Nielsen)
6. 85% of people more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. (Internet Retailer)
7. 80% of Internet users who recall watching a video ad on a website they visited in the past 30 days; 46% took some action after viewing the ad. (Online Publishers Association)
8. 75% of executives watch work-related videos on business websites at least once a week. (Forbes)
9. 75% of an automated email marketing providers reduced the number of subscriber opt-outs by 75% when e-mails incorporated video. (Eloqua)
10. 65% increase in engagement was reported in just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands added videos  (Source: Simply Measured)
11. 64% of website visitors are more likely to buy a product on an online retail site after watching a video. In addition, visitors who view videos stay on the site an average of 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos, (comScore).
12. 61% of B2B marketers leverage YouTube to extend the reach of their messaging and brands (Forbes)
13. 59% of senior executives would rather watch a video than read text. About 65% of those who view a video click through to visit the vendor website, 50% look for more information and 45% report that they contacted a vendor after seeing an online video ad. About 50% of those who viewed an online marketing video went on to make a purchase for their business. (Forbes)
14. 51% of online marketer reported a 51% increase in subscriber-to-lead conversion rates when video was included in an email marketing campaign. (comScore)
15. About 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video (Forbes)
16. 45% of internet users who view at least one video online over the course of a month. The average user is exposed to an average of 32.2 videos in a month. (comScore)
17. 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text. (Zabisco)
18. 26% looked for more information about the subject of the video (Zabisco)
19. 22% visited the website named in the ad (Zabisco)
20. 15% visited the company represented in the video ad (Zabisco)
21. 12% purchased the specific product featured in the ad (Zabisco)
22. 35% increase in mobile video views occurred from 2010 to 2011. (Nielsen)
23. 16% of YouTube videos are embedded, linked or shared on Tuesdays between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (Sysomos).

By the numbers:

1. Mobile video subscription is expected to hit $16 billion in revenue by 2014, with over 500 million subscribers. (Source: Ooyala)
2. 100 Million internet users watch online video each day. (Nielsen)
3. 25 million smartphone users stream 4 hours of mobile video per month. 75% of smartphone users watch videos on their phones, 26% of whom use video at least once a day. (Sources: Ooyala and Ipsos)
4. 1.8 Million words is the value of one minute of video according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research.
5. 1.5 million business-oriented search queries in YouTube every week (SEO Hacker).
6. 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter every minute. (YouTube)
7. Over 60 hours of videos are uploaded each minute on YouTube. (YouTube)
8. 5 minutes Desktop viewers tend to stick with videos for 2 minutes or less, mobile users seem to have a longer attention span. iPhone users tend to watch for about 2.4 minutes. Android users give a video three minutes to engage them and Symbian users stick around for just over 4 minutes. iPad users have the longest attention spans of all, sticking with a web video for an average of 5 minutes. (YouTube)
9. 15 seconds or shorter are shared 37 percent more often than those that last between 30 seconds and 1 minute. If you make your video longer, that stat goes down. Those shorties are only shared 18% more often than videos of longer than 1 minute (Jun Group)
10. 10 seconds is how long you have to grab the attention of viewers in a video marketing clip. 20% of your viewers will click away from a video in 10 seconds or fewer. (Visible Measures)

By the multiples:

1. Videos are 53 times more likely than text pages to show up on the first page of search results. (Gigamon)
2. Posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts. (SEOmoz)
3. Mobile viewers watch videos that are 3 times longer those on PCs and laptops, and the number of mobile viewers are expected to reach over 54 million by the end of 2012.(comScore)
4. 2^nd largest search engine after Google is YouTube. (public domain)

Do you think if Bill Gates were to make a prediction today he would say, “video content is king”? Do these reasons convince you?