Say you're a YouTuber, and you've edited and uploaded your video to YouTube, waiting for the views to increase. However, after weeks, your content could not attract as much attention as you expected. One of the main reasons for this is the massive amount of content uploaded to the platform. YouTube is a leading platform, with 3.7 million new videos uploaded daily. And frankly, your content is like a grain of sand in a desert. But what if there is a way for your content to rise from this whole traffic on YouTube? Here is where captions come to your rescue!
Captions and transcripts are not only tools for enhancing accessibility but also play a major role in increasing the visibility of your video, thus boosting engagement and viewership. Let's discuss how this simple effort of including captions in the video can elevate your channel’s views.
How did captions come into existence on YouTube?
Although Google initiated the usage of YouTube’s captions to their content creators in 2006, it released its automatic captioning tool in 2009, initially available in English, later expanding to 6 European languages by 2012.
Until 2020, YouTube provided captions and transcripts using three tools: manual transcriptions, automatic transcriptions, and community contributions. However, due to low usage, spam, and abuse, YouTube stopped using community contributions in 2020.
Currently, YouTube contains over 1 billion captioned videos, and 5 million people consume those captioned videos daily.
Automatic captions on YouTube YouTube has an automatic captioning tool that relies on machine learning algorithms and automatic speech recognition software to generate captions, and it serves as a starting step for including captions. However, the inaccuracy of these captions due to different accents, background noise, or fast talking is a significant drawback, reducing the accuracy range to 60-70% and posing challenges to viewers and creators. Automatic captions sometimes display jumbled words with no structure, making the audience harder to follow, especially hard-hearing people or those accessing the video on mute. Lack of speaker identification, punctuation, and the unavailability of certain dialogues in the video are some of the other drawbacks of these captions. For instance, in this video, the automatic captions provided do not align with the speaker's dialogue. This showcases the difference between manually provided captions and those generated automatically.
Suppose you’re watching a video whose audio is in a different language, and as a non-native speaker, you’re truly dependent on YouTube’s automated captions. In that case, you might encounter unnatural phrases due to the tool’s inability to recognize the speech. For example, if the speaker is saying, “Isn’t it C to USB? C to USB can be used in this adapter.”, the captioning tool, as shown below, creates random sentences, altering the meaning of the original dialogue.
Why Manual and Third-party captions matter? While manual caption options on YouTube can help creators provide captions independently, creators might find it tiring and must make extra effort to create captions for their videos. Here is where third-party captions come into play, which helps provide accurate, complete, and contextually accurate captions for your video. Third-party captions provided by agencies such as Textar will provide captions maintaining more than 95% accuracy at an affordable price without the creator having to put any effort into them as shown in the picture below.
Here are the reasons why you should opt for the third-party captions:
1) Higher accuracy: Compared to the automatic captions, these captions have been reviewed and edited by professionals, thus improving their quality.
2) Easy and effortless: Adopting third-party captions will allow creators to save the effort and time that would otherwise be spent creating captions on their own.
3) Speaker identification: The caption differentiates multiple speakers, helping viewers distinguish between them. This can be extremely useful during interviews and podcasts.
4) Grammatical errors: After editing by human professionals, these captions will be provided with proper punctuation, decreasing grammatical errors to ensure accuracy.
5) Enhanced accessibility: Improved accuracy will help people, particularly those who rely on captions to access the videos.
6) SEO benefits: Accurate and polished captions can help Google and YouTube rank your video, thus improving its visibility. This means your content will rank higher in search engines, increasing viewership and engagement.
To learn more about how captions can benefit your content, read our blog post through these links: What Are Captions
YouTube transcripts: Along with captions, transcripts are potent tools that can significantly increase viewership in your YouTube videos. Search engines like Google rely on text such as transcripts to analyze and rank videos accordingly. Relevant words in the transcripts allow your video to appear in the search results for specific terms, increasing viewership and channel growth. Textar provides various formats of transcripts, such as .srt, .vtt, .smi, and .txt, catering to the diverse needs of creators and supporting channel growth. In addition, embedding the videos on your website allows Google to index them further in search results, resulting in increased organic traffic through YouTube and Google.
Although many think captions and transcripts are add-ons, adopting captions and transcripts is an intelligent strategy for elevating your YouTube channel. Optimizing the videos with polished and accurate captions can increase your content's visibility, traffic, and engagement. With Textar’s streamlined process, creators can easily incorporate these tools into their content, saving time and effort while enhancing their content’s reach and discoverability.
Get in touch with us to enhance your channel’s engagement. sales@timbel.net
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