EmailEC Content Magazine has come out with its annual "State of Online Video 2018" report, and the numbers are staggering.
You can read the whole thing, but here are the highlights:
- By 2021, a million minutes of video content will cross global IP networks every second, according to Cisco; at that rate, it would take you more than 5 million years to watch all the video crossing the network each month. And within 3 years, IP video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, per Cisco.
- In 2017, Facebook videos got longer; the average video clocked in at just under 4 minutes versus 55 seconds in 2015, per Locowise.
- Consumers demonstrated that they wanted to produce, as well as consume, video content. This is evidenced by a rise in mobile journalist apps and sites such as Fresco News, Storyful, and Stringr.
- More local news organizations used smartphones to report live from remote locations such as hurricane sites.
And that is just a bit of what they are reporting.
The overall tenor of the report however, is quite clear. Video is here to stay and it is quickly becoming the dominant medium on the web. In fact, the whole notion of 'online video' is increasingly becoming something of an anachronism. Video is online, pretty much. And, as Mark Zuckerberg presciently predicted a year ago, pretty soon it's all going to be video.
That means that video literacy - the ability to deal with video as easily and as efficiently as one today deals with text, is going to be as essential to survival in the 21st Century as print literacy was for the past 500 years.
We are becoming a video nation.
But, as with writing, the video has to be fast, efficient, compelling and above all, correct.
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