From traffic volume and formats to browsers and channels

This year, our data revealed a dramatic rise in image bandwidth traffic: 25% across all industries. On average, Cloudinary managed 199 billion image requests each month. And while the top three supported image formats remain the same as last year, the rankings have changed. While JPEG remains the leader, lighter-weight WebP has overtaken PNG, and now ranks second.

When it comes to image usage, however, WebP emerged as this year's frontrunner. Our data revealed that brands used this less bandwidth-hungry alternative more than twice as often as JPEG. From March to May 2022, WebP received 59% of requests but consumed only 35% bandwidth, whereas JPEG received 23%, but consumed 38% of bandwidth. Usage of other newer lightweight formats such as JP2, HEIC, and AVIF also grew markedly, though brands still don't support these as widely as the top three.

Video traffic also grew and gains were most impressive in retail and consumer goods, where video bandwidth spiked by 37% to 1,489 TB. Other industries where video traffic made gains include software and technology, travel and recreation, automotive and manufacturing, and real estate.

Video codec support and usage followed a similar trend. The established MPEG-4 is still the most supported codec, followed by WebM and Transport Stream. However, in terms of video requests, the more lightweight WebM clearly emerged as number one, with almost 74 billion requests over the analyzed time frame. This was followed by the streaming file format Transport Stream (58 billion), with MPEG-4 (21.5 billion) ranking a distant third.

This year's data also reinforced the need for brands to support a growing range of devices and engagement touch points, including game consoles and smart TVs. For example, an average of roughly 2.7 million image requests were delivered to Sony BRAVIA TVs per month.

As our data show, image and video bandwidth traffic is climbing. Epic scale has become the new normal for e-commerce brands. But even in the most impressive mountain ranges, some peaks stand out. What Mount Everest is to the Himalayas, Black Friday is to visual media bandwidth.

According to our data, e-commerce companies overall saw their image bandwidth grow by 186% around Black Friday compared to their average traffic annually. Even more impressive was the increase we saw for small and medium e-commerce sites, which experienced peaks of up to 415%. The largest brands in our study experienced many similar spikes throughout the year, with just a slightly higher peak during Black Friday.

Interestingly, where video is concerned, the trend is just the opposite: video traffic remained quite steady over the year for smaller brands, whereas bigger e-commerce brands saw their video bandwidth increase during Black Friday. One of our largest e-commerce customers saw their video bandwidth traffic shoot up from around 20 TB a week to 52 TB over the Black Friday period.

Managing and delivering this epic scale of video and image assets is impossible without automation and AI. This explains why despite these big numbers, the brands in our study did not have to increase their storage use around Black Friday; they could simply use the images and videos they had already stored in Cloudinary and automatically adapt those for their Black Friday campaigns with little or no extra work thanks to the AI.

These scaling capabilities will become even more important as new trends continue to transform the e-commerce experience. For example, our data show a remarkable growth for TikTok with 100% more requests in April 2022 than April 2021. Regardless of whether it's TikTok, 3D asset galleries via shoppable videos, or user-generated content to Direct-to-Avatar (D2A) commerce in the Metaverse, the trends that are reimagining e-commerce use images and videos powered by automation and AI.

The momentum behind composable (aka agile or headless) architectures continues to gain steam as brands understand the need to balance improvements in efficiency, innovation, and performance. And all while appetites for visual-first experiences remain insatiable. This leaves brands challenged to create numerous visually-rich experiences for every possible channel and touchpoint while ensuring everything performs at lightning speed. Goals can be at odds with one another without the right technology stack in place.

What's more, in an increasingly unpredictable and hypercompetitive business environment, brands must be able to react quickly to change. The travel industry, for example, saw a more than 50% increase in video usage as part of the post pandemic recovery. Brands today must have the ability to scale up and down in an instant. And this urgency for responsiveness calls for open, best-of-breed IT architectures in which adding and replacing new technologies is fast and seamless.

The MACH movement

MACH is an acronym that stands for Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless architectures. The MACH Alliance is a vendor-agnostic organization founded in June 2020 dedicated to advocating open and best-of-breed tech ecosystems. The Alliance, of which Cloudinary is a member, aims to "future-proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences" through MACH technology.

An open, composable architecture ensures that every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable — and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements.

The headless Cloudinary solution, for example, works seamlessly alongside a brand's CMS and automates image and video optimization workflows. This automation includes cropping, applying brand overlays or filters, and optimizing visual media quality and file size for a user's browser, screen size, and orientation.

A recent MACH survey among IT leaders across several key geographies showed that MACH adoption is high on the agenda. Of those surveyed, 47% said they were aspiring to move from monolithic to best-of-breed, composable software, up from 36% last year. And 79% expressed a strong intention to add more MACH components to their architecture in the future.

The need for speed

For Cloudinary customers, this new approach of a composable IT stack allows them to make easy, incremental changes as needed and without huge investments or big decisions upfront. Their only regret: not acting sooner.

There are few areas where brands need to act and react faster than social media. One month, brands run campaigns on TikTok — and the next they need to react to a trend on Instagram or a Tweet that's gone viral. We see this speed and volatility as well in our data, where images or videos requested for one platform have a peak one month and a shift the next.

With more than 154 billion image requests, Facebook is the clear number one social media channel, followed by Instagram with 74 billion and Pinterest with 51 billion. However, if we look at the numbers over a year, we see clear trends for these channels. The number of image requests for Facebook and Pinterest are both continuously declining, while Instagram remains stable and TikTok is rising. Comparing April 2021 to April 2022, Facebook requests declined by 23% and Pinterest by 79%, while Instagram increased by 2%, and TikTok shot up by 67%. With nearly two billion requests, TikTok is still far behind Facebook. However many brands use Facebook to authenticate users on their sites, which often initiates image requests of users' profile pictures.

Beyond the classic social media channels, people increasingly engage and share links through private messaging apps or "dark social" channels. In these channels the traffic generated from links shared on apps and platforms like Slack, SnapChat, or WhatsApp is difficult or impossible to trace. Our data reveals a growing demand for these channels. In terms of images or videos delivered to these applications, SnapChat is the most popular with more than 5.5 billion requests, followed by WeChat with 4.5+ billion requests and Facebook Messenger with 3.5+ billion requests. Looking at the numbers over the course of a year, image requests for WeChat increased 76%, while SnapChat decreased by 2%, and Facebook Messenger by 21%.

In the world of business communications, Slack's image requests grew by 46%. And given its more professional usage, the overall number of more than 83.5 million requests is quite significant.

Digital transformation and sustainability: two big initiatives keeping business leaders awake at night. But there is good news: research from Bain & Company and the World Economic Forum found that 40% of executives believe digital technologies are positively impacting their sustainability goals. As brands become increasingly reliant on visual media to connect and engage with consumers, ensuring those assets are managed and delivered as optimally, and sustainably, as possible is critical.

Bandwidth and CO₂

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, calculates that every gigabyte of data transferred takes 5.12 kWh of electricity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average US power plant expends 600 grams of CO₂ for every kWh generated. This means that transferring 1 GB of data produces roughly 3 Kg of CO₂.

One of the best ways to improve the CO₂ footprint of a website or app is by reducing bandwidth. And one of the most effective ways to reduce bandwidth is to reduce image and video file sizes.

Not as easy as it sounds when you're managing tens of thousands to millions of visual media assets, which is why technologies that automate the process are key. For example, Cloudinary's AI-based tools automatically determine an image or video's optimal file size and quality, and convert it into a newer, more lightweight format or codec that best matches the user's device.

Optimizing video saves 1,890 tons of CO₂

To illustrate, a top international sports apparel brand was able to reduce bandwidth consumption by 40% from 6.8 TB per day to 4.05 TB per day. Annualized, the company saved 618 TB of bandwidth, which equals 1,890 tonnes of CO₂ saved. This savings is equivalent to taking more than 400 gasoline-powered cars off the road or conserving enough energy to power 368 homes for a year.

Of course, sustainability is a complex puzzle and reducing the emissions of a website is just one piece of it. But as more and more of our lives move online it's hardly insignificant. Neither is saving 1,890 tons of CO₂ per year. Everything businesses can do to reduce bandwidth takes them that much closer to meeting their sustainability goals.

Read here to learn other actions you can take to save bandwidth.