GWI: Middle East and Africa watch the most long-form video.

GWI's Global Media Intelligence Report 2026 finds that internet users in the Middle East and Africa lean harder on long-form video, vlogs included, than users in any other world region. Latin America leads on social media, short-form video, online press and podcasts.

The report, published on 29 October and presented by eMarketer, covers 49 countries grouped into seven regions. Its measure is relative weekly use of each media type, built from what respondents say they consumed in the previous week. GWI converts the answers into average weekly hours using the midpoints of its time bands, so the figures are estimates of self-reported habits rather than tracked viewing.

Globally, internet users aged 16 to 64 spend about 7 hours 7 minutes a week on social media and 7 hours 6 minutes on short-form video. The regional comparison is shown as a chart, and Communicate's write-up gives no readable per-region numbers for the Middle East and Africa, so the size of the lead is not stated. The report also notes that North America leads on video streaming, music streaming and gaming, Western Europe on broadcast TV and radio, and South and Southeast Asia on print, while East Asia and Oceania sit lowest on most digital categories.

Two limits matter. The region is Middle East and Africa as a single block, so the result says nothing specific about Saudi Arabia or the Gulf, and the sample sizes per country were not given in the coverage. This summary relies on Communicate Online's account of the report, not on GWI's own page.

For marketers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the finding is a prompt to test longer video formats rather than treat short clips as the default, and to ask GWI for country-level cuts before shifting budget on a regional average.