Why YouTube Closed Captions Matter
How Important Are Closed Captions Are you wondering about how necessary captions are for your YouTube videos? Will captions bring you more views? Interestingly enough, Digital Discovery Network did a study that showed that captioned videos bring in 7.32% more views. That alone should encourage most YouTubers to start adding captions. And there is more. Professional Captions Using VidCap One Of Many Apps Found On Setapp. What Is Metadata &How Crucial Is It? We all know how crucial metadata is to YouTube, including your title, descriptions, and tags! TechTarget says that "Metadata is data that describes other data, providing a structured reference that helps to sort and identify attributes of the information it describes." YouTube reads this data relating to your video, and it's all taken into account when running their algorithms. Captions are part of that metadata, and not having that can be detrimental to the views that you could be getting. How To Caption Your Videos There are several ways you can caption your videos. You could do it manually and then upload them, but that is so time-consuming, I tried it once and decided life was too short to waste my time when it could be used to do other more constructive tasks. You can let YouTube do it for you and I can tell you I've tried that too but YouTube does a pretty poor job of it. I reckon you'd be lucky if the captions YouTube provides you are more than 60-70% correct. Then you have to go into the captioning area and edit YouTube's captions. Not correcting YouTube's faulty captions means you're presenting the wrong metadata and giving the wrong information about what your video is about. More Important Than Metadata Something even more important than metadata is that 36 million people in America alone are deaf or have trouble hearing. Let alone the other countless millions that live around the world. Then some people don't have hearing problems and watch YouTube videos with captions because they don't want to bother the people around them. There are countless of times when I wish a video had captions because I couldn't understand what was said. In cases such as this, captions have proven to increase comprehension. Best App For Captioning You Videos I'm writing this post is to let you know that I have found an app that makes captioning a cinch. That app is called VidCap and is part of the Setapp arsenal of hundreds of quality apps, all at the low subscription price of $9.99/month. You can read all about Setapp in my Is Setapp Worth The Money post or watch my video Is The Setapp Subscription any good? Watch my video Does Setapp's VidCap Captions Work to see VidCap in action. All in all, captioning is going to help your channel, making it more accessible to a lot more people. YouTube knows this, which is why they include it in their metadata. Personally, I'm going to go through all my videos, adding captions to those that I believe…