Who’s Using Video in 2025? (Top 1000 Sites Breakdown)
Everyone says video is awesome, but how many of the top 1000 sites in the world by traffic actually use it?
This is what I wanted to answer. Since we all know originality is overrated anyways.
I turned to the pros to answer the question: should we be imitating them?
To do this, I used AHREFs 1000 top websites list, and sorted by:
- Does the site use video?
- If yes, on which page? (home, landing, etc)
- What type of video?
- What style?
- Type of site?
Using this data I was hoping to find some juicy correlations. The kind that would make for an amazing clickbait headline.
What’s more is we had done this exercise in 2021 (but not published our results). So that gives us about 4 years of data in between to judge on as well.
Insight #1: Video is not a “must”
Marketers love to say “____ is dead”. It’s just a really popular marketing headline. So don’t take it too seriously when you read it. Video is another one of those anomalies. From one point of view: we know it works. From another: does it?
It takes a lot of money, time and effort to make a video that converts. And no, just putting a video up doesn’t help you convert more. This is why a lot of websites with simple offers: like Facebook, or Youtube, don’t actually have a homepage video telling you why to sign up. It’s kind of obvious. And it may be taboo to say it: but you know, pages without videos CAN convert higher than with? All this to say: don’t get in the way of your customer experience.If people are signing up without seeing a video there’s a reason for that. They are getting enough information and their objections handled without needing more. So sometimes investing into a high-end video is just a waste of your time/money.
Fewer & fewer sites are using animated video
This comes as a partial surprise. Animated video really exploded in the last 2 decades. However part of the reason for this is that live action used to cost a LOT. Today in 2025 a commercial can cost you from 5-10k for something quite high end and nice. Just 20-30 years ago the same commercial would cost you 50-100k.
Enter animated video. Marketers realizing they need videos but not wanting to spend the huge live action budgets turned to animation. Animation was immediately a bit: off brand, generic, not as “wow” as actors but also a fraction of the cost.
However as the cost of animation stayed roughly the same, the cost of live action productions fell dramatically.
- Equipment like cameras, lenses and pretty much everything got a lot cheaper
- Today it takes fewer people to operate all the equipment
- We even see the start of 1-3 people film crews
Even most social media influencers are benefiting from the trend of technology improving. As the power of our handheld phone cameras improves, and the quality of image increases, and it reduces the need to look for other styles of video.
This may play into the trend of less animated video. Which may need the AI revolution to make it competitively priced again.
For now though: live action video is winning on price and could be gaining popularity as a result.
Video Player Hosting: Marketers Prefer Free
This was surprising. Most marketers use Youtube or Vimeo. They don’t use Wistia. Which is strange because there’s a lot of talk around analytics.
But yet, at the end of the day, analytics really is just “how did your video do?”. What I mean by this is: there’s a lack of real in depth analytics. You just get the usual: views, average watch time, a graph with drop offs. There’s no eyeball tracking. Or advanced correlations being calculated. In fact most of the time, it’s painfully similar and obvious metrics provided by each video player (paid or free).
And paid players often offer some almost irrelevant customizations like: player button controls, branded colours, opt-in pop up forms… things which are not likely to move the needle for you. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that many marketers are opting for the free version.
Where is the video located… and why?
It feels like the “slap a video on it” craze is over.
Marketers tried that. A lot of budgets were burned, and senior execs found out that just because it’s a video doesn’t mean it will definitely work. The proof for this? “About Us” videos on company pages have gone down. Almost extinct. My theory is simple: companies realized making culture videos isn’t a good idea, unless the video is really good. So those 3-5 minute corporate “here’s us” stories are pretty much non-existent now.
Because marketers are putting that budget towards social content, paid ads, and higher quality creatives. Which removes it from peripheral objectives like the “having the best about us” page. In some ways it also speaks to a misunderstanding of humanization. Video does an amazing job of humanizing brands. Period. It allows you to show REAL people to your audience.
So you don’t need to worry about OVER humanizing your brand. Or in other words: showing every member of your team smiling, saying something clever. Actually this type of video can easily backfire since it’s purpose is hard to nail down.
Making it easy to turn it into something slightly off brand, a misstep in the wrong direction.
Observations About Data
Even with our limited comparison of these 2 months we can see that from 2021 to 2025 there is a noticeable increase of videos on landing pages and a decreased number of them on sub pages like about us pages.
While live action type videos have remained pretty stable we’ve seen a decrease in 2D and 3D animated videos in large part due to the continued proliferation of video sharing platforms making live action easier to access for video.
Comparing the top 50 sites what's new what has changed significantly
- Youtube has had a notable jump from 4th in 2021 to 1st
- Twitter has had a massive fall off from 2nd to 15th
- Imdb as jump to 10th for video compared to 2021 where it was 121th
- Linkedin has fallen for video from 5th tin 2021 to 29th in 2025
- Tiktok is 13th in 2025 compared to 205th in 2021
- Roblox is 48th and didn’t even make the list in 2021
- bit.ly has drop off the map from 2021 where it was 29th to 2025 where it doesn’t even make the list most likely due to the massive amount of more competition in this space. This data may also be squed due to how arefs counts video on a site as bi.ly is more so a link sharing platform so no video is actually hosted on the site it just redirects to other more popular sites like youtube and ig etc.
- Reddit 52nd in 2021 v 5th in 2025 most likely due to google prioirtizing reddit due to a deal they made in 2024
https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ax1nyh/reddit_has_struck_a_60_million_deal_with_google/?rdt=40434
- VK has dropped off from 2021 from 32nd to 135th this is most likely due to the founder of VK the russian video sharing platform much to the same degree as facebook being forced to work with the russian government on censorship on the platform
Whats the data around video use in 2025 REALLY saying?
These are the most popular sites on the internet, so a lot of them
- Have a really great offer (thats why they are popular)
- Are well known (requiring less explanation)
- Easy to understand (i.e really great offer)
So maybe for these sites a video is NOT so essential. Because they are not some super niche tech B2B product that nobody can understand. How hard is understanding Facebook in 2025?
So it’s hard for us to know from the top 1000 sites the REAL state of video. And we also don’t know how these websites USE video to market themselves. Or what ad campaigns worked best for them. And we DO know they advertise with video (many of them).
It’s possible that homepage videos aren’t the most effective use case for these companies. Or that homepage videos for simple offers aren’t necessary, or could even REDUCE conversion rates by making the sign up process too complex. And if we look at the growth of video consumption statistics as a whole, we can start to understand that homepage videos AREN'T the main driver of this growth. So for marketers it may be time to experiment with new types of video. Instead of simply trying to make what worked in the past work again.
Today it seems social media and paid ads are driving the hugest gains when it comes to video.
