Shocking YouTube Statistics & Captioning Benefits 2024

If you are a video content creator, there is a drive to improve your channel to capture more views and watch time for every one of your uploads. You want to learn more about distribution and SEO ranking and continuously produce quality uploads to keep up with the millions of content uploaded to the site on a daily basis. 

As video content creation continues to grow and expand, a number of content, visual or not, are made each day contesting to know some practices, tips, or must-dos that will help any creator garner more views and engagement in their channels. One way to block out the information overload is by looking at the proof, which you can find through various YouTube statistics. 

One thing that YouTube statistics are finding out is the usefulness of adding captions to content to garner all the benefits from the increase in views and upping in search results on YouTube. 

Key YouTube Statistics Creators Should Know

Before moving into the benefits of closed captioning or any form of subtitles to your YouTube upload, it will help to look at some YouTube statistics that will motivate you to up your strategies to garner views from people worldwide, hard-of-hearing or not. 

A significant share of daily internet users, or up to a third of them, log in to YouTube and watch videos on the platform daily. To add, YouTube also holds the record of having the second largest search engine on the internet. 

In terms of viewership, up to five billion videos on the platform are being watched a day, with up to six billion video hours recorded each month. For creators who earn up to six figures a year, that value is guaranteed to increase by 50% each year you are active on the platform. 

These numbers are so reliable that the Top 100 brands in the world collectively upload video content on the platform every 18.5 minutes. 

Aside from captioning, another excellent strategy for the overall success of any channel is making sure their videos are optimized for mobile devices since up to 50% of YouTube viewers utilize the platform’s application available for mobile. 

Adding captions is not just a great business move, but it also gives your audiences wider accessibility options. 

YouTube Statistics: Benefits of Adding Closed Captions 

In Watch Time and Engagement

Brands know the benefits of video marketing brought by countless YouTube statistics in attracting and engaging every audience globally. One of the most apparent proofs of these statistics can be seen in Facebook, where user engagement has grown by 18 percent because of videos. 

Captioning can add to user engagement and extend the amount of time that viewers will spend watching a particular video up to 40 percent. With subtitles, 80 percent of viewers are more than likely to watch the video from beginning to end, which is especially helpful and essential in video advertising for monetized videos. 

Aside from that, videos with a call to action or branding message will also be seen and heard if videos are watched to completion. 

A study done by a company providing captioning solutions has found an increase in watch duration by up to 38% for videos that have subtitles or captioning available for them. 

Some people do not have the option of watching the video with sound depending on many circumstances. Viewers like these are more likely to finish the video if captioning or subtitles are available. 

In a joint study done by Verizon Media and Publicis Media, they have found out that up to 80 percent of people in their survey are more likely to watch a video with subtitles available. This is not only about accessibility reasons. 

Most of the respondents watched a video on the go, in public places, which means that it will mostly be on mute, and captioning and subtitling helps them digest and understand the video. 

In Video SEO for Views

One of the best benefits of adding closed captions or subtitles to your YouTube upload is that it enables your video to rank higher in search results, both on YouTube and Google. Video contents are fifty times more likely to appear on the first few pages of Google results than any text content, giving video content the edge for a higher click rate. 

Without captions (or words) available for your video other than the title and the video description, Googlebots have no way of “reading” your video content and thus making it impossible for your content to rank higher in the search engine. 

The result of captioning or transcribing your videos for subtitles will make it easier for Google to make your video content more searchable, which will give you an edge over competitors without any captioning available to their content. 

If your videos are on the first pages of Google or YouTube, there is more likely to be more traffic to your site, adding to the viewership of your video and more exposure for the channel in general. 

Another thing that you should know when it comes to SEO is that there are specific keywords about a video topic that are helpful for your page to crawl up the first pages of Google and YouTube. The more a keyword or a keyword phrase is used on a page, the more it is likely that Googlebots will deem your video as relevant to people’s search. 

One way to ensure that specific keywords are used is by adding captions to a video. 

YouTube Statistics: For Better Viewing Experience 

Creators strive to give their audiences a better viewing experience of their videos. One way to ensure that is by adding closed captioning, which can make them enjoy the video almost anywhere they are. This factor is critical among younger people. 

In a survey in Italy conducted among different age groups, younger people from 18 to 24 years old are more likely to watch a video and have it on mute if captioning is available. About 18.84 percent of people in this age group disable the video’s audio, in contrast, people ages 37 and over will be more likely to have the audio turned on. 

This choice for closed captioning is also evident in other video forms outside of YouTube or Facebook videos. Many countries and cultures around the world prefer closed captions over dubbing an international film in their language. 

50.7 percent of people in South Korea will watch an animated film with subtitles from the film’s original language, while 3 out 4 people in France over 35 years of age will prefer watching foreign movies with subtitles. In contrast, Polish people prefer dubbing over subtitles, with only 4 percent of the respondents preferring closed captioning. 

Viewer behavior statistics like these prove that sound is not the most effective way of getting any message across with videos, so adding closed captioning is the cherry on top that can make the experience convenient for all kinds of viewers.

Adding captioning in your video will also prioritize visual communication methods over vocal speech, which is the trend in YouTube statistics that many video creators should note. 

For High Accessibility

In prioritizing visual communication over speech, you improve the accessibility of your content so that all people, the hard of hearing or not, will be able to access your content from everywhere. Captions are there to assist any deaf or low hearing persons, and videos without captions will be inaccessible for them. 

Over 5 percent of the global population have hearing or a degree of hearing loss, and that is at least 360 million in the world that will benefit from closed captioning. Access is everyone’s right, and ensuring that your video caters to this population will have a more significant impact and require little work for a creator.

Not to mention that giving access to everyone is also the law. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act dictates that auxiliary aids like close captions and subtitles should not be absent to ensure that people with disabilities are not denied information or excluded. Making sure that they have access is critical; that is why aside from having the option of closed captioning, these captions should be accurate, synchronized, and complete. 

On-screen text or close captioning is critical to many people. Up to 80 percent of people who use closed captioning in digesting video content do not have a hearing impairment. 

Aside from the accessibility it poses for the deaf and the hard of hearing community, captioning and subtitles are also there for videos that are not clear and muffled as they can help get their message across. Closed captioning also makes it possible for anyone to access video content, no matter where they are and what circumstances they are in. 

For Language Learners

Part of useful YouTube statistics you need to know is that one theory that suggests why more countries prefer dubbing over captioning or subtitles is perhaps because many people want to learn a language other than their own; this is especially true for non-native English speakers. 

Studies have found that videos in a person’s native language with foreign subtitles can help in learning the language with some methods and techniques more productive than the next. The best way is to hear the sound and read the closed caption simultaneously to make sure that learners will connect the words with their corresponding sounds.

One of the most challenging factors of learning a language is understanding what you hear or read. One of the benefits of learning a language through movies is that the subtitles play simultaneously as the speaker does in everyday conversation. Films with captions will stretch a learner’s listening comprehension, and it will also help increase their reading speed. 

Films with captions also allow learners to provide context for conversational idioms and phrases, expanding their vocabulary of that particular language in the process. This part of language learning will usually concern a fluent speaker in a conversation but watching videos online with closed captioning can help and speed up the process, especially for individual self-taught learners. 

The last benefit of videos with closed captions to aid language learning is their visual aspect, which can help in vocabulary recall, allowing learners to associate a word or conversational phrase with the movie’s visuals—sort of like a memory aid or conjugation flashcards. 

In Increasing Productivity

We have already established the significance and benefits of video captioning not just for the deaf or the hard of hearing community but also for everyone to use beyond accessibility. Aside from aiding in language learning, subtitles and captions also generally help with learning and increase comprehension for anyone digesting a video medium. 

Over a hundred empirical studies have been conducted pointing to the benefits of closed captions to aid children, college students, professionals, and adults, in general, to comprehend and retain information from the video, whether it is in their non-native language or they are hard of hearing. 

This is very evident in children nowadays who have access to screens at an early age more than the generation before them. Although it is not recommended, 2020 has seen a rise in children’s screen time, and one way to ensure that they are at least learning is by adding closed captions to their videos. 

A study in India found that children’s reading levels improved by having closed captions available on the Bollywood film they were watching. This factor points to integrating videos with closed captions for the students, and at least 56 percent of the students become better readers because of it. 

Closed captions go beyond the importance of accessibility, and in this case, it almost doubles the effectiveness of school for many children if videos with captions are integrated correctly and productively. 

Adding Caption on YouTube

Now that you have known YouTube statistics about the benefits you and your viewers can reap from your video content, it’s time to look at your options for adding subtitles and captions to your uploads. 

Google and YouTube offer four options to add subtitles and captions to your videos so that they can reach a wider audience. These four options are uploading a file of your video transcription, auto-syncing the captions, typing your captions manually, or enabling auto-translation. 

Uploading a text file of your video transcription will give your audiences the most accurate captions for your videos. The text files should include timestamps so that each line of text will be in-sync with the audio. To make it even more accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, the position and styling of the captions are also possible. 

Auto-syncing will entail creating captions by typing them out as someone is watching the video. This option will make it possible for your captions to be translated to other languages that YouTube supports. 

Another automatic option is to type manually. If you already have a transcript of your whole video script, it will be easy to paste it, and the timing with the audio will be set automatically. 

Because of the speech recognition technology available on YouTube, it is now easier to create captions for any video. Although this makes it more accessible, the quality of captions provided by automatic captioning may vary since machine learning algorithms do it, which sometimes can misinterpret dialects, accents, or mispronunciations with other words. 

Final Thoughts

Research and YouTube statistics point to the many benefits of adding captions to every video upload. 

An increase in content viewership, engagement, dwell time, and the many social reaches are only some of the benefits posed by adding captions to your video’s audio. At the same time, the benefit for the people in terms of accessibility and educational purposes for the viewers is also a great benefit of closed captions. 

Adding captions to videos does not have to be a complicated process, especially now with Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR technology which offers an accessible and fast video transcription. 

The many YouTube statistics are not lying, and video captioning might give you that edge to get ahead of your competition. 

For quality and reliable captioning service, order today!