Key Takeaways
- Long-form video is outperforming short clips for business buyers, with 30- to 60-minute videos seeing roughly 23% click-through rates compared with about 1% for videos under a minute.
- AI tools have pushed in-house video production from 35% to 55% year over year, letting teams raise quality while proving they’re authentic and real.
The rise of TikTok, Reels, and Shorts created a widely accepted belief that audiences no longer have the patience for long-form content. Everything got shorter. Faster. More disposable. The 45-minute keynote gave way to the 45-second clip, and marketers everywhere started trimming their content to match a shrinking attention span.
But new data from Wistia, a video marketing platform for businesses, suggests the opposite may be true — at least when it comes to business buyers. Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report shows marketers aren’t giving up on long-form content anytime soon. And the numbers back them up.
Consider this: videos running 30 to 60 minutes see click-through rates near 23%, while videos under a minute hover around 1%. And 75% of companies now host webinars, making them one of the most widely used forms of video content across the board as webinars rank as the second most impactful video type for businesses, trailing only educational videos. Meanwhile, the number of channels featuring on-demand webinars on Wistia’s platform nearly tripled over the past year. People aren’t just showing up live — they’re coming back on their own schedule, watching the whole thing, and digging deeper.
To unpack what the data means for your strategy, we sat down with Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia. Savage has spent 20 years watching video go from an expensive luxury to a core marketing muscle, and he has strong opinions about where it heads next. In this Q&A, he tackles three subjects that should be on your radar right now, the surge in in-house video production, and what a smart content strategy actually looks like as long-form and educational video keep gaining ground.
Demand Gen Report (DGR): Everybody talks about attention spans shrinking—it’s not the 45 minutes anymore, it’s the 45 seconds on TikTok. But your report tells a different story. What made you realize the conventional wisdom wasn’t so wise?
Chris Savage: The data is pretty clear. Click-through rates on longer videos are much higher. A video that’s 30 to 60 minutes long sees click-through rates around 23%, versus roughly 1% for videos under a minute.
I call it the great bifurcation. Everyone is far more discerning now. If your content doesn’t grab someone in the exact moment, they’ll swipe away. But if they find the thing they care about, they’ll go way deeper than we ever imagined.
We just didn’t have the content before, because video used to be so hard to make. You couldn’t find long-form content on rebuilding tractors or making homemade guitars. I’ll admit it—I’ve become a fan of mechanical watches, and my wife will find me watching two-hour videos on how IWC builds their balance wheels. Why? Because it happens to be a topic I find fascinating.
We’ve all been trained to swipe away from what doesn’t matter to us. But when you find the right thing, you go deeper than ever. And it’s not just entertainment. It’s happening at work, too. Pick any job. Everyone’s trying to navigate the AI transition—what do I do, how is my role changing? If you find a 90-minute webinar on exactly your job and how people are adapting, you’ll show up in droves, because it’s that relevant. That’s the less sexy story, so it doesn’t get discussed as much.
DGR: We had to get to AI in the first five minutes—we’re legally bound. Our thesis this year: last year people played with AI personally and professionally, and now they’re figuring out how to build it into their workflow. Does your report show that?
Savage: One of the most interesting findings is the percentage of companies that say they have in-house video production. I’ve been doing this 20 years. When I started, I was cold calling people, and they’d say, “Video sounds great, but it’s way too expensive.” Almost no company in 2006 produced video internally.
Last year’s report put in-house production at 35%. This year, we hit 55%. When you dig into why, companies point directly to AI enabling their teams to own video in a way they simply couldn’t before. We expected this shift—just not this fast. It’s the classic example of technology letting people do things they couldn’t otherwise. Should you use AI to write everything you post on LinkedIn? No. That comes across as slop, and slop erodes trust.
But can you use AI to transform something you’ve written into a script? Absolutely. When you actually understand what you’re saying and speak it out loud, you’ve just made something you couldn’t make before. We have an agentic video editor at Wistia—you upload or record video, then tell it what edits you want. Editing intimidates people; chatting doesn’t. The content itself is still real. That’s what makes it powerful.
DGR: The report notes that 75% of companies now host webinars, putting them right behind educational videos in importance. What does that rise tell you about what business audiences want?
Savage: Business audiences want to trust the companies they interact with, and a webinar builds trust. Do live Q&A and you prove you’re real. You prove you have genuine domain expertise. People are turning to live events to consolidate learning and go deeper right now.
Part of it is uncertainty—that pushes people toward live events. But the trust you build there is why I expect webinars to keep performing. And I expect in-person events to do even better.
DGR: Here’s the interesting tension. You talk about live webinars driving impact, but the number of channels featuring on-demand webinars nearly tripled over the past year. People want to watch on their own schedule. What do you make of that shift?
Savage: This is the big thing most people running webinar programs aren’t optimizing for. People sign up because they’re interested. You might get 35 to 40% to attend live—that’s great. But the other 60% aren’t useless. They come back. They care about the topic.
So the question becomes: can you nail the right topics and repurpose that content well? Treat the webinar as a primary asset.
Here’s what you’ll see over the next couple of years: production quality on webinars is going to climb so much that it may not make sense if you’re only counting the live audience. But it makes total sense when you factor in the on-demand audience, the repurposed clips, the sales enablement—all of it.
DGR: Walk us through that— are you talking about quality of content or quality of production?
Savage: Both. On production, tools inside a product like Wistia essentially give you a video producer built in. You switch between who’s on camera, highlight different things, and get lower thirds added automatically. It streams natively, so it looks amazing. You get polished polls and counters. The software raises the production ceiling.
Once you see the lasting value of a webinar, everything changes. It’s not just the live viewers. It’s the on-demand audience. It’s the sales enablement and success enablement. It’s even social media content—your niche audience will engage with clips if they’re trying to learn on a topic.
That justifies more investment upfront, because you know you’ll extract value later. When people treated webinars as one-time live events, they’d think, “Only 50 people showed up, why bother?” But reframe it: 50 came live, 100 more watch on demand, and tens of thousands see the clips. Suddenly that investment is easy to make.
DGR: Beyond the webinar numbers, what stat jumped out at you that you didn’t expect?
Savage: The in-house production jump was the most shocking. I expected it to rise—I didn’t expect that much.
The other one: educational videos lead engagement at every duration we tested. Even past the 60-minute mark, educational videos still hold a 17% engagement rate. That’s remarkable. We don’t give ourselves enough credit here, because we assume our attention is all second-by-second swiping. That’s part of it. But when we find the right thing, we go much deeper.
It mirrors what we’re seeing with AEO. It’s harder to get people to your website, but when they arrive, they’re better researched, more engaged, looking for confirmation they’re making the right choice—rather than wondering who you even are. The same thing is starting to happen with content.
DGR: That connects to something we discuss a lot: the website isn’t the beginning anymore for the customer journey, it’s closer to the end. People have done everything else first. So how do webinars fit into that ecosystem?
Savage: A few ways. Webinars and their clips can drive some of that traffic to your website. When people arrive, they want to confirm they’re making the right decision or get specific questions answered. In-depth webinars serve someone who isn’t ready to book a demo or hop on a sales call yet—but they’re close. Every visitor to your website is more valuable now, and webinars are one of the best ways to convert and engage those people.
Then there’s the data. Webinars are incredibly rich—an hour of nuanced discussion. Getting that content into the LLM matters. We have something called LLM-friendly embeds. It detects when an agent hits your site and tells it exactly what content lives inside the video embed. That’s important because the crawlers people use can’t run JavaScript to see what’s inside the player. It’s simple, but it’s something everyone should be doing with long-form content. You’re creating it knowing a human will benefit—make sure the agents benefit, too.
DGR: For someone hosting or planning a webinar, what’s the single most important thing to do in the first five minutes to keep people watching?
Savage: Do something in the first five minutes. Hook them. Make them feel they’re in the right place. The real question is: what’s your hook? It’s different for every topic.
But one thing works almost universally—people want to know, is this real? Is this live? Build in a quick moment that answers that. Ask the right question. React to something in the chat. It doesn’t take much, but it takes something.
Streamers have this figured out. They stream for hours and integrate the comment section the whole time, so you know it’s real, and that makes it compelling. We set the bar impossibly high for ourselves in these settings. The truth is, sitting down and having a good conversation with someone can be one of the most riveting things in the world. The question is whether you can make someone feel that fast. Even something simple—”We’re live, we’re live, where’s everyone joining from?”—and then you name the places. That’s it. They’re with you.
DGR: Long-form and educational videos keep gaining ground. A couple of years out, what does a smart content strategy look like—and what should marketers start building today?
Savage: Ask yourself: what research can we do that others can’t? What will our customers keep coming back for? That takes time to invest in, but it’s the thing that sticks around and stays valuable across every content format.
Expect two things to rise at once. Expectations on production quality are going up everywhere. And at the same time, authenticity and trust become more valuable. So play with the tools. Raise your quality level, because everyone else’s is rising and audience expectations are rising with it. That doesn’t mean you sacrifice authenticity or trust—it means you have to get good at proving you’re real. Give your perspective. Share your opinion inside the resource, so someone can judge for themselves whether they agree. That’s what wins.
