With the advent of social media applications such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and others, brands, businesses, and individuals have been able to network, educate, enlighten, and delight their audiences.
Youtube, for example, has become more than just a platform for companies to entertain or inform their followers. It has also become a platform for freelance YouTubers to earn passive income. Based on the SocialBlade live YouTube data statics, there were 33.7 million subscribers. Also over 2 billion views on October 22, 2022.
Video content creation has become an integral part of any growth strategy. As demonstrated in our previous article, highlighting the differences between closed captioning generated by machines and closed captions created by humans.
Our goal in this post is to elaborate on the debate over whether to use automatically generated captions or to hire a service provider to do the job.
Benefits of using subtitles or captions on your YouTube videos
More than 100 empirical studies demonstrate that captioning a video improves the following aspects.
Understanding of the subject matter
Enhance user attention
Improve the ability to memorize and recall video content
Capacity to summarize key points
The ability to draw inferences
Recognizing the presenter's emotions.
Furthermore, while in the United States, closed captioning is required by law for the benefit of people who are deaf or who have hearing impairments, captioning also benefits everyone. This includes children and people who do not speak English as a native language.
Thus, adding subtitles to your YouTube videos can increase engagement and video views by 10%. You can also increase your channel's reach to 466 million people who are deaf or have hearing difficulties.
Using YouTube's automatically generated subtitles vs. subtitle service providers?
This depends on various factors, as discussed in our previous posts. Are you more concerned with accuracy than cost? Your target audience, your budget, your turnaround time, etc. The advantages and disadvantages highlighted below will provide you with the information you need to make your informed decision.
Adding subtitles to a YouTube video with autogenerated scripts
YouTube is a cash cow for Google. Since 2005, the platform has grown exponentially. I have seen an increase in daily users, video quality, feature creation capabilities, and more. For example, they have implemented a speech recognition system that can automatically transcribe speech.
YouTubers have therefore been able to add subtitles to their videos while uploading them to YouTube and can also enable automatic caption generation during a live stream.
Advantages of using automatically generated subtitles
It is completely free
You don't need to a file (SRT)
You can add a timestamp
You can edit videos within the platform
Disadvantages of using automatically generated subtitles
There is a significant amount of time involved in this process
The system does not support all languages
When there is significant overlap between speakers in a video with multiple speakers, it is not suitable.
Since it is a machine-generated script, some of the subtitles may seem inauthentic.
There is no guarantee that it will be as accurate as human captions. As shown in the quote below, Google warns you against using the automatic captioning option.
“ Note: These automatic captions are generated by machine learning algorithms, so the quality of the captions may vary. We encourage creators to add professional captions first. YouTube is constantly improving its speech recognition technology. However, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise. You should always review automatic captions and edit parts that haven't been properly transcribed.”
Making use of a subtitle service provider
As you might already know, the market is flooded with subtitling service providers. There are freelancers on Fiverr, medium and large agencies, and enterprise-level service providers. The choice will be overwhelming, but now that you've landed on this page, you'll have an easier time making your decision.
Hire a professional YouTube subtitler or closed captioning service provider to improve your video content strategy. Captions make it easier to catch and keep your audience's attention. Not only will they help you convey your message, but they will also improve the search engine ranking of your content.
A list of recommended service providers
As most people know, Rev is an industry leader in subtitling and transcription. As an industry leader, they manage a large pool of freelancers to support the delivery of their services to their clients. Even though they are leaders in the field, that does not guarantee they will be the right fit for your needs. I will address this issue in a subsequent article.
3PlayMedia acquired Captionmax, a leading captioning company in the United States. They provide a variety of language services, including captioning and subtitles.
Littext has some of the best prices for closed captioning, transcription, audio description, and subtitling services. By providing a user-friendly account system, fast turnaround, and integration with various video players and platforms. We provide closed captions and subtitles in a variety of languages and formats, you can check more details in this link.
The consequence of poor subtitling
A poor quality subtitle service could adversely affect your business's marketing efforts in the long term; therefore, video subtitles are essential for any marketing strategy.
For example, videos with inaccurate subtitles can lead to the following:
Chances of sending the wrong message
You fail to impress your prospects
Reducing user engagement
Choosing Littext has several advantages
You may wonder why Littext would be a better transcription service provider than other popular providers. But Littext was made to help YouTubers, podcasters, and small businesses eliminate some of their problems. We discovered that other big players do not give much attention or personalize their services. Therefore, selecting us is like becoming a member.
Some of the benefits of choosing Littext include, but are not limited to, the following:
Quality (99.9 % guaranteed) and personalize service
Secure and confidential delivery methods
Full attention to your problems
Lowest price
Fast turnaround time
Final notes
With platforms like YouTube, adding captions to videos has never been easier. Ensure your caption files are correct and easy to read so that your viewers will not only watch your whole video but also remember it and interact with it.
Find out how Littext's video subtitling services can help you reach a broader, more engaged audience with your content in this link