Digital storytelling now spans social feeds, video libraries, webinars, podcasts, and personalized customer journeys. The available figures show both the scale of that environment and the operational challenge behind it: billions of social identities, millions of videos uploaded daily, and organizations working to connect stories across channels while maintaining quality and trust.
Contents
- The scale of the digital storytelling audience
- Where US audiences can encounter stories
- How organizations produce and fund video
- The formats shaping cross-media storytelling
- Webinars and the afterlife of live stories
- Personalization, continuity, and audience expectations
- AI, measurement, and trust in content creation
The scale of the digital storytelling audience
DataReportal counted 5.04 billion active social media user identities globally at the start of 2024. The measure is user identities rather than necessarily unique people, so it describes the scale of social accounts and presences available to storytellers rather than a deduplicated global population.
The United States provides a high-connectivity example. DataReportal recorded 331.1 million internet users at the start of 2024, equal to 97.1% internet penetration. It also counted 239.0 million social media users in January 2024, or 70.1% of the total US population. The US population was 340.9 million in January 2024, after increasing by 1.8 million, or 0.5%, between early 2023 and January 2024.
The technical environment supports rich, immediate formats. Median US mobile internet speed was 106.28 Mbps at the start of 2024, while median fixed internet speed was 219.71 Mbps. Urban audiences were especially prominent: 83.4% of the US population lived in urban centres at that time. The median age was 38.2.
YouTube’s own press information said more than 20 million videos were uploaded daily on average, while YouTube Shorts averaged more than 200 billion daily views. The platform was localized in more than 100 countries across 80 languages. Together, these figures describe a crowded publishing system in which a story may compete with a very large flow of short and long video.
Where US audiences can encounter stories
DataReportal’s early-2024 US platform figures show why digital storytelling is better understood as a cross-media practice than as a single-channel activity. The reported audience or membership measures are not perfectly interchangeable, and advertising reach is a separate measure from platform users.
| Platform | US audience or membership | Reported US reach measure |
|---|---|---|
| 190.9 million users | 56.0% of total population | |
| 169.7 million users | 49.8% of total population | |
| YouTube | 239.0 million users | 70.1% of total population |
| 220.0 million members | 64.5% of total population | |
| TikTok | 148.0 million users aged 18+ | 55.3% of US adults aged 18+ |
| X | 105.4 million users | 30.9% of total population |
| Snapchat | 106.2 million users | 31.2% of total population |
| 89.05 million users | 26.1% of total population |
TikTok’s reported advertising reach also equaled 44.7% of the local internet user base. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, Snapchat, and Pinterest were each reported against the total US population in the supplied DataReportal figures, while TikTok’s adult-audience denominator is explicitly different. These distinctions matter when comparing channels.
Pinterest’s US advertising audience was 71.5% female, 18.2% male, and 10.2% unspecified gender. Those figures describe the platform’s reported advertising audience, not all US Pinterest users and not a general measure of who can engage with a story.
How organizations produce and fund video
Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report surveyed more than 900 professionals and analyzed over 13 million videos and 79 million hours of viewing data. Its production figures point to a broad base of recurring video activity rather than only large studio campaigns.
Seventy-six percent of companies made at least one video per month. Almost 40% spent under $5,000 producing videos in the prior year, while just over 30% spent more than $5,000. For the report’s current-year outlook, 40% expected to spend more on video and 46% expected to keep video budgets the same.
Promotion budgets showed a similar appetite for continued distribution. In 2025, 41% of companies spent under $20,000 on video promotion and advertising, and 28% spent over $20,000. For the report’s current-year plans, 48% intended to increase video-promotion budgets, while fewer than 10% intended to cut them.
Production structure varied with output. Outsourced video production saw a 7% year-over-year increase. At the same time, 41% of the highest-volume producers relied on an in-house team more than other groups. This suggests that high publishing volume can support internal capability, while outsourcing remains part of the wider production mix.
Company goals and product launches drove more than half of video decisions. The most regularly created formats included educational videos, social videos, product videos, and webinars, each produced by more than half of companies according to the Wistia report. Video therefore serves both narrative and practical roles: explaining an idea, introducing an offer, demonstrating a product, or carrying a live event.
The formats shaping cross-media storytelling
Format choices changed over time in the Wistia data. Full HD 1080p was the most common upload resolution. Vertical HD uploads were 24% higher than the previous year, while 4K uploads were up 16% year over year. In the same comparison, 720p uploads were down 8% and square-format uploads declined by 4%.
These are production and upload trends, not evidence that one format is universally best. They do show a portfolio becoming more varied: vertical video can serve mobile-first social storytelling, 4K can support higher-resolution viewing, and 1080p remains the most common reported resolution.
Customer testimony also became a more prominent planned format in the Wistia figures. The share of companies planning customer testimonial videos was 17% in 2023, 37% in 2024, 38% in 2025, and 47% in the report’s current-year measure. Podcasts were planned by 14% of companies in 2024, 18% in 2025, and 21% in the current-year measure.
The pattern is useful for storytellers working across media. A single narrative can be adapted into a testimonial, a podcast discussion, a short social cut, an educational explainer, or a longer product story. The figures do not establish that these formats are always repurposed together, but they show a widening set of formats in organizational plans.
Webinars and the afterlife of live stories
Webinars illustrate how digital storytelling can continue after a live moment. Nearly half of webinar teams started within the past five years, and 46% of webinar teams went live at least once a month, according to Wistia’s 2026 State of Video Report.
Attendance was lower than registration: about 40% of people who registered for a Wistia-hosted webinar showed up. That figure describes the share who attended among registrants, not the total potential audience.
The recorded event continued to attract attention. One-third of webinars were still receiving plays three months after the live event. Replay length also mattered in the reported engagement comparison: webinars between 31 and 45 minutes saw more than twice the engagement of webinars under 30 minutes.
Nearly half of teams reused webinar content. That reuse can turn one live story into several editorial assets, although the supplied figures do not specify which clips, transcripts, or excerpts teams created. The measurable point is that the webinar was not limited to its original broadcast window.
Personalization, continuity, and audience expectations
Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends research surveyed 8,600 qualified respondents across its executive and practitioner sample. The report also drew insights from 6,500 client-side marketers and customer-experience professionals plus 6,800 consumers. Its client-side sample included 4,100 practitioners and 2,400 senior leaders; 76% of all respondents were client-side marketers and 24% were agency executives, consultancies, or marketing-technology and services vendors.
The client-side sample was 42% Europe, 32% North America, and 22% APAC. By business model, 32% served B2B, 23% served B2C, and 45% served both equally. By industry, technology accounted for 21%, manufacturing and engineering 14%, retail and ecommerce 14%, financial services 13%, and media and entertainment 7%.
Adobe classified 21% of all respondents as Market Leaders, 35% as Market Challengers, and 44% as Market Followers. Among consumers, 49% were men and 51% were women. Age groups were 12% aged 18–24, 17% aged 25–34, 17% aged 35–44, 17% aged 45–54, 20% aged 55–64, and 13% aged 65–74.
The experience figures connect audience expectations with storytelling continuity. Sixty percent of consumers said they became frustrated when brands knew a lot about them but ignored their preferences. Eighty percent said seamless interactions across channels were important or critically important. Among senior executives, 44% selected cross-channel optimization as the most powerful customer-experience improvement.
Personalization confidence differed by market position. Seventy-one percent of senior executives at Market Leaders rated their personalization approach above average or best in class, compared with 42% of senior executives at Market Followers. At the same time, 41% of senior executives identified unifying data as an improvement area. For cross-media storytelling, the implication is specific: consistency depends not only on creative adaptation, but also on whether the organization can connect the information used across touchpoints.
AI, measurement, and trust in content creation
Adobe reported that 71% of practitioners saw clear benefits from AI for content creation. Forty-one percent of senior executives said content creation and management was the number-one generative-AI use case. The interest is paired with a measurement need: 52% of practitioners were seeking to improve analytics and insights for content performance.
Quality and confidence remain constraints. Fifty-seven percent of organizations said quality and customer trust were significant challenges when managing AI-generated content. This is especially relevant when a story is adapted across channels, because scale can multiply both useful versions and inconsistent ones.
Wistia’s accessibility figure adds another operational measure: 90% of teams were already taking steps to make their videos accessible. Taken together with Adobe’s cross-channel findings, the figures point toward a digital storytelling workflow with several simultaneous requirements—reach audiences on the channels they use, adapt formats to the context, measure performance, preserve continuity, and maintain trust.
For readers studying storytelling across media, the central numbers are therefore connected rather than isolated. The audience is large and distributed; YouTube alone receives more than 20 million video uploads daily on average. Organizations are producing monthly video, increasing vertical and 4K uploads, planning more testimonials and podcasts, and reusing webinars. Meanwhile, Adobe’s respondents place high value on seamless cross-channel experiences while identifying data unification, analytics, quality, and trust as continuing work areas.