Videos importance in today's Internet dominated world should be evident by YouTube's 1 billion unique visitors each month.
In fact, Nielsen, a global information and measurement company, states that YouTube reaches more U.S. adults (18-34) than any cable network.
If businesses still need convincing, technology giant Cisco has released its latest report titled Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2013-2018. The report dives into how the Internet will change by 2018 and how the methods by which people will be accessing the Internet in 2018 will differ from today.
Perhaps the most important forecast in the report is that by 2018 video will make up 79 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. This is a significant rise from videos 66 percent share of Internet traffic in 2013. While nothing can be said with absolute certainty, it seems very likely video will become a mandatory part of a businesses marketing plan.
In years past, there were obvious excuses to omit using video's (e.g. cost of equipment and lack of sufficient Internet speed). However, with the video quality of many smartphones and the ability of modern servers to handle greater amounts of data, the river of excuses is starting to run dry.
Another important prediction is that worldwide mobile traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 61 percent between 2013 and 2018 to 15.9 exabytes per month in 2018 (for those who don't know a single exabyte is more than 1 billion gigabytes).
Moreover, the report also says that business IP traffic will grow faster in the Middle East and Africa than anywhere else. In fact, business IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 23 percent in the Middle East and Africa compared to the global average of 18 percent.
Forecasts and predictions are no crystal ball. Sometimes they pan out and other times they don't, there is just no way to know for sure. Whether a company takes Cisco's predictions seriously or not is up to them. However, even if the forecasts fall short, wouldn't a business still benefit from creating a high-quality video?
