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Social platforms are ramping up on emergent video formats to drive new and deeper forms of engagement across their sites and apps, yielding new opportunities for brands.
As platforms experiment beyond in-feed videos, new formats and user behaviors around social video present meaningful opportunities for brands to reach millions of social users. In 2018, social platforms saw explosive growth around innovative video formats like Stories; a rising push around communal video experiences; the launch of new video-centric hubs on social platforms (e.g. IGTV); and the expansion of more premium or longer-form fare.
In The Social Video Report, Business Insider Intelligence examines how video is evolving on social platforms, and how each platform's priorities are developing and shifting as social networks seek to scale viewership on this content. Social platforms continue to undergo transitions in a bid to capture user attention, but each represents a significant key to understanding how the social video landscape is expanding and reorganizing around new formats and distribution models.
The companies mentioned in this report are: ByteDance, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
- Social video advertising investment is expected to grow significantly in coming years. Social video ad spend is expected to reach $25.6 billion by 2023, up 128% from $11.2 billion in 2018, per Business Insider Intelligence forecasts.
- Social video ad spend flows overwhelmingly to the dominant social platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat. Nearly three-quarters of YouTube ad revenue comes from video content, 60% for Snapchat, and 55% for Twitter, per eMarketer. Video is only 30% of Facebook's total ad revenue, but the social giant accounts for the largest share of social video ad spend overall.
- The Stories format has seen explosive growth over the past year. That growth continues to flow overwhelmingly to Instagram: Instagram Stories hit 500 million daily active users (DAU) as of Q4 2018, up from just 150 million DAU in Q1 2017. Instagram is the leading platform for Stories consumption and sharing: 54% of users say they use Instagram Stories the most, compared with other platforms, per Business Insider Intelligence exclusive data.
- Instagram launched IGTV, which it intended to be a YouTube competitor on long-form, user-generated video — albeit mobile-first and vertically oriented. If IGTV can convert Instagram's 1 billion users to consume video there, it could represent a massive, scalable opportunity as soon as the platform starts to monetize the section with advertising.
- Facebook Watch has pivoted to a communal viewing focus as it looks to scale viewership. But even though half of US adults say they've never even heard of Watch, some shows have demonstrated that they can gain loyal followings nevertheless.
- Snapchat continues to traffic heavily in ephemeral video, but the app is ramping up on premium video through Snapchat Originals. That push has helped drive a surge in video engagement on the app: As of fall 2018, the amount of time users spent watching shows each month nearly tripled since January 2018.
- TikTok's rapid growth has suggested that there's space in the landscape for short-form social video. TikTok has been downloaded more than 1 billion times globally, and was the No. 4 non-game app worldwide in 2018 on both iOS and Android devices, per Sensor Tower data.
In full, the report:
- Examines and forecasts the rapid growth of social video ad revenue through 2023 across each major platform.
- Identifies how video formats are evolving on social platforms as companies seek to drive new types of engagement among users.
- Presents a platform-by-platform portrait of key social platforms' emergent video efforts and how they're each performing on key measures, including audience uptake and monetization.
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