Why is Closed-Captioning So Important | Fade 2 Black Productions
Channel: Fade 2 Black Productions
Date: 2015-07-14

Hi welcome back to Fade 2 Black Productions. I'm Daniel Sanz and in this video we're going to talk about YouTube captioning. Specifically what it is and why you want it.
In short, captions or "close captions" are just a transcription or a visual representation of any dialogue said that appears on screen. It's easy enough.
YouTube includes this feature because Google and other search engines actually will often implement your caption data in search terms and search availability. So if somebody is searching for a topic they can look at your video see say "well ok I see a transcription" and it applies that to the searchability of your video.
Now you might be asking "wait a minute, doesn't YouTube already do automatic captioning? Why do I have to worry about it?"
The short answer is, yes YouTube does do automatic captioning but if you haven't used it yet or actually experienced it yet, then invite you to go ahead, click the "CC" button down below, watch a little bit of this video, see how it transcribes and then you decide for yourself if it's good or not.
Basically, yes the feature is there, but it's not quite up to speed yet. Google is still working with it and because of it's high error rate it doesn't actually incorporate any of those search terms into your video's content so it's definitely to your benefit to do your own transcription because you're just going to make your content that much stronger and then search engines will actually use it and catalog it versus the automatic feature which it at this point in time does not.
So that's pretty much the primary reason why you would want to do captioning to begin with is it adds searchability to your video content.
The second reason is it increases views. YouTube and Google don't just base search results and the strength of your video based solely on how many hits it gets or how many subscribers you have. It takes into account the hits and the length of time viewers watch your video, when they quit, do they quit right after the add or do they watch halfway through, or all the way to the end? It takes all that into account.
By having captions on screen it tends to engage your viewers a little bit longer, whether it be relevant information or they get caught up reading it or it's just actually they understand the content better. It will statistically increase the viewership length of your views, of your videos.

The third reason is accessibility. If you've got captions in your video that's just a tool for people who are hard of hearing or maybe you've got a viewer who wants to see your video but they're somewhere that they can't play sound or they don't have headphones or whatever the reason might be, captions will help them with that. So you're basically, you're just adding another tool to engage your viewer because the chances are if someone can't play the sound they might be "oh well I'll go back and watch it later" but many times they won't and you don't want to lose that viewer.
So basically those are your three reasons, the three primary reasons: The search content of your video, increase viewership and lengthen your views, and accessibility.
So yes can you do it yourself? Absolutely, YouTube's got a whole array of tools for your videos you can into your channel, click on the video and manually type out the video. Yes it is time consuming but in the end it is worth it.
If you don't want to do it yourself then there's lots of services that will do it for you, our included. Our I.C.E. video marketing packages, our whole YouTube marketing packages include video transcription and captioning so you don't even have to worry about it.
So in a nutshell, captions are important, it's adding enhancement and benefits to your videos and it's something that you just don't want to overlook.
Thanks for watching.