LinkedIn surpasses YouTube as the top B2B video platform, according to Wistia data

Wistia released its 2026 State of Video Report, drawing on a survey of nearly 1,000 marketing professionals and analysis of more than 13 million hosted videos. The headline finding is significant: LinkedIn has officially displaced YouTube as the primary video channel for B2B marketers. It’s a platform shift that has implications for how teams allocate production resources, set success metrics, and think about distribution strategy going forward. 

LinkedIn’s rise in B2B video isn’t a surprise, but the speed is.

YouTube comes in at 76% as a primary video channel, but the trajectory is what tells us the real story. LinkedIn’s share climbed 33 percentage points over just two years, a place few platforms sustain at that scale. The platform now leads not just for organic video distribution, but for repurposed clips and paid video ads too. This gives B2B marketers a single platform where all three functions can operate together. 

LinkedIn’s own research adds context: 73% of video completions depend on creative decisions rather than production budget. That means authenticity and relevance matter more than polish, which changes how teams should be thinking about what to make, not just where to post it.  

Views are out. Engagement is in.

The report documents a parallel shift in how teams measure video success. Social engagement is now the top metric for 22% of marketing teams, nearly double the 12% recorded in 2024 and the fastest-rising measurement category in the survey. Views, historically the default proxy for video performance, are losing ground to signals that reflect real audience response: comments, shares, saves, and reactions. 

The logic is straightforward. LinkedIn rewards content that sparks interaction instead of content that accumulates impressions. With the average B2B buyer journey spanning more than 200 days, measuring views alone misses most of what video actually contributes to pipeline. Engagement is a closer proxy for the kind of influence that matters. 

AI adoption plateaued. That’s fine, actually. 

One of the more counterintuitive findings is that AI adoption in video workflows dipped slightly, from 41% to 38%, after nearly doubling in the prior survey cycle. The report doesn’t read this as a retreat. Teams are settling into more practical, lower-risk AI use cases—captioning, transcription, scripting, and ideation—rather than chasing headline applications like avatar generation or fully automated production. 

The hesitation teams report are consistent: concerns about output reliability, data privacy, and skill gaps. Notably, 90% of teams grew their marketing technology stack in the last year, yet only 17% say their stack actually meets their needs. More tools aren’t automatically solving workflow problems, which is a useful reminder for any team evaluating new AI investments. 

Why smart teams are shifting budget from production to distribution.

Only 49% of marketing teams plan to increase spend in 2026, down from 57% the prior yar. But distribution and promotion budgets tell a different story. Forty-eight percent of teams are increasing what they spend getting content in front of audiences, while just 7% are cutting it. The strategic shift is clear: get more mileage from what already exists rather than producing more from scratch. 

The repurposing numbers back this up. Nearly nine in ten companies repurpose webinar recordings into shorter clips, emails, blog posts, and social assets. On-demand replays continue generating views for up to 12 months after the live event. For teams with tight budgets, webinars in particular are proving to be unusually durable content investments. 

The takeaway.

If LinkedIn isn’t already your primary video channel, the data suggest you’re allocating resources against an outdated platform hierarchy. Chasing views on the wrong platform is a losing strategy. Generating genuine engagement on the right one, with content that earns saves and comments from the right audience, is where B2B video ROI is increasingly being built.