Consumers spend more time watching live video content than pre-recorded broadcasts, and content marketers should take note of this trend.

As brands explore ways to diversify their video marketing campaigns, they’ll soon discover consumers prefer a wide array of visual content, including long-form clips. With the advent of social video sharing applications like Vine and Instagram video, marketers have experimented with shorter videos as ways to tease and entice viewers into checking out additional branded content. But companies’ new and existing customers also want in-depth video content that tells an entire story in a single sitting.

A new study from Ooyala suggests consumers are no longer willing to allow producers to dictate how they view information online. This has led a lot of broadcasters to produce on-demand video clips for users to enjoy at any time, and has also encouraged brands to record media for customers to view at their leisure. However, the Ooyala study also shows that web users spend longer periods of time watching live video than on-demand posts – approximately 37 minutes longer per session.

Consumers allocate an average of 40 minutes to watching live, long-form video content per day, compared to 3.15 minutes for video-on-demand. If Ooyala’s analysis carries over to how people engage with all forms of visual content on the web, it makes a case for brands to funnel resources toward live-broadcasts like webinars and Google+ Hangouts over recorded updates for YouTube or corporate websites.

Brafton recently reported that webinars are a serious conversion driver for many companies – both as live presentations and as downloadable web content after the event is completed. While in a recent ClickZ survey, consumers indicated they’re more likely to engage with webinars in full on their own time, 19 percent of surveyed brands told Bright Local that they will focus more attention on webinars in 2013 than in the past. With consumers embracing live and long-form video content, it makes sense for marketers to create campaigns with their target markets’s preferences in mind.

Ted Karczewski is an Executive Communications Associate at Brafton. He works to develop his own voice and apply his passions to the evolving world of SEO and content marketing, but he doesn't shy away from writing for fun. After graduating from Suffolk University, Ted used his Communications degree to test out Sports Journalism before Marketing at Brafton.