Why it matters:
- Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has seen its sales double this year, to $6 billion.
- YouTube is the top U.S. streaming service, and the dominant media company in terms of TV viewership.
- Vimeo had over 100 million videos uploaded and 50 billion video views in 2024.
“The medium is the message.” When communications guru Marshal McLuhan popularized that phrase in the 1960s, he was talking about how the delivery method — print, radio, or television — shaped the message.
Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, the new reality is that video has become the crucial medium for delivering marketing messages.
Executives from three video-focused brands – Whatnot, Vimeo, and YouTube recently spoke with CO— about the importance of video platforms for brand growth. Here are their key insights.
Whatnot: ‘This is the year that live shopping becomes more mainstream’
Six-year-old startup Whatnot has seen sales on its livestreaming shopping platform explode. It announced at the end of October that 2025 sales had already exceeded $6 billion, up from $3 billion in 2024.
On Black Friday, the platform rang up $75 million in live sales, three times the amount spent on that day in 2024. First-time buyers quadrupled compared to the prior year.
That growth is happening because Whatnot is filling a need for both buyers and sellers, Armand Wilson, Vice President of Categories & Expansion at Whatnot, told CO— in an interview about the platform’s founding and growth.
For sellers, particularly small businesses, “live shopping really powers the ability to sell things fast, and Whatnot makes it more efficient to sell,” Wilson told CO—. “It’s been life-changing for sellers.”
For buyers, it answers the demand for interactive, immersive shopping experiences, and it leverages the growing use of mobile phones for shopping.
Whatnot, as a relatively young e-commerce platform, has an edge in being an early adopter of AI tools since the launch of its first livestreams. It recently announced new AI tools that help sellers quickly generate product listings and reach more potential buyers.
With AI-powered chatbots and search engines increasingly becoming the first tools consumers turn to when making purchasing decisions, ensuring your marketing messages are discoverable by and promoted by AI recommendation engines is critically important.
Vimeo: “To be discoverable and relevant in this new AI era, it’s super important to have video content’
With AI-powered chatbots and search engines increasingly becoming the first tools consumers turn to when making purchasing decisions, ensuring your marketing messages are discoverable and promoted by AI recommendation engines is critically important for businesses large and small.
Vimeo Senior Vice President Zoe Black’s top tip for businesses in the new age of AI search is “be video first.”
“We know video is becoming more and more important in terms of relevance and ranking in the context of LLMs [large language models used to train AI tools] and search, so creating a lot of video content is a really important tactic” for businesses, Black told CO—.
Vimeo for its part, is helping small businesses succeed in the new age of AI-driven search by offering tools to help its users post, edit, and manage video content, making it easier to create videos that can reach more customers.
“We have a lot of small business owners using Vimeo to create content — and then embed content on the website to drive discoverability,” Black said.
Traffic to e-commerce sites from generative AI sources surged 4,700% from July 2024 to July 2025, and AI-led shoppers stay on e-commerce sites longer and are more likely to make a purchase, according to Adobe.
“Many of the large language models used to train AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity are starting to prioritize video content more and more,” Black said. Because of that, Vimeo began allowing ChatGPT and Perplexity to index its user content, meaning that brand messages are more likely to be discovered in AI-powered searches.
When a Vimeo video is embedded in a website, all the traffic generated by AI platforms goes back to the brand’s website, not to Vimeo, unlike other videos that drive traffic back to the video-hosting platform, Black said.
[Read more: Vimeo Exec on Why Video Is Crucial for Businesses Large and Small in the New Age of AI]
YouTube: Brands need to figure out ‘how do we introduce our message in a way that’s going to land?’
YouTube was founded 20 years ago on the premise that video would become a key medium for delivering messages. Now, the video-sharing platform owned by Google is using AI tools to help brands deliver video messages where and when the right customers will be watching.
“Consumers are interacting with up to 130 mobile touchpoints a day — we have to figure out how do we introduce our message in a way that’s going to land?” YouTube Head of Creative Partnerships Kevin Babcock told CO—.
AI is enabling YouTube advertisers to match their messages to peak moments of viewer engagement and to tailor ad messages so they can be displayed on multiple YouTube formats, from a mobile phone to a widescreen TV. AI can also convert an ad into six-second, 15-second, or 30-second versions, depending on the target audience.
These AI-powered formats “streamline the [media] planning and buying process so you can think about your budget and your objectives and then lean into the products that matter for you,” Babcock said.
The end result, he said, “is a lot of much more effective ads.”
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