Influencer Marketing on Video: A Quick View

If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a video worth a million megabytes? It certainly feels that way as video consumption just keeps growing aggressively. According to Cisco, video made up 64 percent of U.S. data consumption in 2014 and it will blow up to 85 percent by 2019. This enormous growth only makes the stakes in the online video industry higher and the conflict between the companies who dominate it more contentious.

At times, it can be difficult to understand the players who’re becoming the ideal channels for influencer marketing campaigns, the key platforms for creators to embrace and where the audiences are growing and falling. Mode Media decided to take a shot at visualizing all of that into a map that organizes the industry into a landscape reminiscent of something you might’ve seen inside the cover of a Lord of the Rings book.

Thankfully they didn’t just fantasize the borders and names of the countries on their map like J.R.R. Tolkien did. The structure of their map takes comScore data from U.S. viewing habits into account to represent the size of the “states” within each “country” (or category of video supplier). Mode Media noted that their visualization is purely based on views of videos so this should be a direct comparison across video platforms, social networks, streamers and owned content sites.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the map is the size represented by the social platforms versus typical long-form video site, especially if you include Snapchat’s little fiefdom (which, as we’ve reported before, sort of sits in its own social world) and maybe the tiny-but-growing kingdom of LinkedIn. They’re building big time against user-generated content video hubs like YouTube as well as the streamers (of course, now YouTube Red is a kind of hybrid country on the map).

Speaking of those streamers, considering how many smaller streamers seem to be aligning (with Amazon and Microsoft getting Disney’s service into their world and Hulu adding Showtime and more), next year’s map just might see fewer players in the Streaming South. In fact, the most notable omission here is Amazon, a players in both digital boxes and long-form streaming. They just might show up elsewhere in the near future.

While the map leaves interpretation to the marketer, it’s still a quick way for brands and marketers to look at where their video marketing budget should go to maximize views and visibility. With the growth in social media dominance in the industry, influencer marketing is destined to become even larger in scale in 2016. Simply put, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are doing such an exceptional job of building libraries of user-generated video content and delivering them in a way that helps engage modern audiences that it’s the ideal way for brands to connect with them.