The Multifaceted Benefits of Captioning: Accessibility, SEO, and Beyond
Explore how captioning enhances accessibility, boosts SEO, improves comprehension, and aids in content reuse and translation, benefiting diverse audiences.
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Benefits of Adding Captions to Online Video
Added on 09/30/2024
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Speaker 1: So we'll go through some of the benefits of captioning, and there are a number of different reasons why people transcribe and caption their video content, and we'll cover some of these things. So the first one is accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing. So this is really a very big issue. In the U.S. alone, there are 48 million people, so that's roughly one in six, that have some sort of hearing loss that's significant enough to impact the ability to understand the video. The second reason is search engine optimization, or SEO. If you're creating video content for marketing purposes and you're trying to increase the traffic to your site, adding captions is a great way to allow search engines to understand more about your video, because search engines can't watch a video. So they rely on the metadata and surrounding text, and often with video, that means that they know the title of a video and maybe some tags, but they don't really know very much else about it. Whereas if you transcribe a video, it just provides search engines with a much deeper and broader understanding of what that video is about, so that you have more keyword diversification. We've done several studies with some of our customers to try and understand exactly what is the impact of adding captions to videos. One such study that we did was with Discovery Digital Networks, where they did a controlled study with the two pretty large groups of videos on their YouTube channels, and one group they added captions to and the other group they didn't, and they monitored the impact over the course of over a year. And they found that on average, the videos that had captions had 13.48% more views in the first two weeks, and then the lifetime increase was 7.3% more views for the videos that had captions as compared to the ones that didn't. The next benefit is that captions improve comprehension, and they allow the video to be consumed in noise-sensitive environments, like a library or workplace, especially in cases where computers sometimes don't even have speakers, so it's impossible to hear the audio without headphones. So captions really make that content a lot more flexible. And there was a really interesting study that was done by the BBC in conjunction with the Office of Communications. They found that 80% of people who turn on captions actually don't have any sort of hearing loss whatsoever. They do it because it helps them to understand the content better. So we thought that was really interesting. The other benefit is that it's possible to use transcripts and captions to make the video more searchable and interactive and more engaging, and we make a number of tools that work with the video for that very purpose. Captions may be required by law. We'll talk more about that in just a minute. Captions and transcripts also make the content a lot more reusable. So a couple of examples here. This is coming out of University of Wisconsin. They did a study with some of their graduate students, and they found that 50% of their students used the transcripts for the videos. They actually download them or print them out, and they use them as study guides, which is really interesting. And then what a lot of our customers are also doing is they're taking a transcript for a video, for example, from a webinar, and they're using that transcript to create a lot of different derivative works, such as case studies, blog posts, and white papers. Professors often use transcripts as a starting point to create journals and even to write textbooks. And lastly, transcripts and captions are used as a starting point for translation and creation of multilingual subtitles to foreign languages.

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