Why Are Subtitles Important for your YouTube Channel?
You always work hard to maintain your YouTube channel. You make lots of efforts to generate amazing content, enhance distribution, and incorporate SEO, among other things. How else would you promote your channel?
Let’s put statistics to use. Stats can explain what your channel’s reach might look like. Try getting a rough sense of crucial YouTube data points, accessibility’s impact, creator statistics, and more. Through these statistically produced results you can predict the outcomes of adding subtitles to all of your videos on YouTube.
Adding subtitles on YouTube videos lends them an edge via SEO advantages while increasing viewership time. Furthermore, subtitles (or closed captions as they are also known) enhance engagement while increasing accessibility. So, despite all these advantages, why aren’t more and more YouTube creators close captioning their videos?
YouTube Data Revelations You Must Know
While Google hasn’t officially disclosed the exact volume of videos on YouTube, we can say for certain that YouTube has definitely shaped the way in which we look for, consume, and share videos.
YouTube attracts the majority of active internet users. (Nearly 50% of global internet traffic is channeled towards YouTube). Hence, that makes YouTube the 2nd most used search engine on the Internet.
Here are some more stats for your consideration:
- YouTube hosts nearly 1.9 billion actively logged in users per month.
- 1 billion new users add up to YouTube’s base every month.
- YouTube gets nearly 2 billion views every day (as of May 2010).
- People watch 5 billion videos on YouTube daily.
Mobile devices account for 505 of YouTube’s views, hence videos optimized for mobile devices tend to garner more views; closed captions being one of those optimizations.
How YouTubers Reach Out Via Subtitles
With almost 50 million video creators on YouTube and nearly 5 billion videos being shared on YouTube every day, an increasing number of videos are being captioned to reach newer audiences who speak languages different from that used in the video.
Today, a breathtaking 1 billion videos contain captions.
Adding subtitles is a step towards greater accessibility, and is a smart move business-wise. Captions attract a new community, increasing the number of shares and watch time while boosting your video’s ranking.
Why You Should Strive For Accessibility
It’s time you consider a universal parameter for your videos’ accessibility on YouTube. How many potential viewers you think visited your channel but left because of your videos’ inaccessibility?
Consider this:
- 466 million people globally are either hard-of-hearing or deaf.
- 71% of YouTube viewers with disabilities immediately leave a video if they don’t it accessible.
- Only 360 million people around the world speak English as their primary language.
- 60% of the total YouTube views are from those English speakers who don’t speak English as their primary language.
Using closed captions on your YouTube videos helps you reach a considerable audience. Subtitles are important to make your videos more accessible to a wider audience.
While more creators on YouTube are striving towards creating accessible videos, many still do not. Make sure you are not one of those.
Why Are Subtitles Important for your YouTube Channel?