3 Reasons Why You Should Subtitle Your Videos

Subtitles are crucial when it comes to increasing engagement

Subtitles increase audience engagement in three ways:

1. they make videos more accessible
2. they improve search engine indexing
3. and therefore, they raise your positioning in the search results.

If The Wizard of Oz had been subtitled, it would have found success much earlier

The history of cinema is written with films that started out as flops but went on to achieve extraordinary success over time. Just look at The Wizard of Oz by Victor Fleming. The film saw its debut on 12th August 1939 in a cinema in Wisconsin, received immediate critical backlash and was written off as a failure. However, the film was rebroadcast on television in 1956 and enjoyed unprecedented success. Today it is considered a masterpiece, and often ranks highly in cinema magazine lists of the best films in the history of cinema. The Wizard of Oz was a work of art, but audiences in 1939 just were not ready to recognise its potential.

This is the perfect example to start a discussion about the importance of subtitling videos to increase views and audience engagement. A video’s content might be flawless, but if you want to get the attention of a wider audience, it is going to need subtitles.

Subtitles make videos more accessible

Subtitling is closely linked with the concept of accessibility. The following reasons are what makes them important:

1. the video can be accessed by people who are deaf or hard of hearing
2. the video can be accessed in any situation or environment
3. the video can be accessed by people who don’t know how to turn the sound on
4. the video is more accessible to audiences of non-native speakers.

1. The video can be accessed by people who are deaf or hard of hearing

According to National Statistics data, about 1 in 5 adults in the UK suffer from significant hearing loss. In other words, about 11 million people suffer from hearing loss in the UK. So, let’s imagine that a British company, or English speaking company in general, wants to launch its videos on the Spanish-speaking market. Data from Spain, for example, shows that some 7 million people in the country are hard of hearing. Evidently, adding subtitles to the video would make a significant difference, as the product concerned will have much more reach.

2. The video can be accessed in any situation or environment

A viewer might find themselves in situations where they are unable to hear a video’s audio: for example, when watching at stations, airports, or on public transport, background noise can easily interfere if you don’t have headphones. Or, you might find yourself in the opposite situation: in very quiet environments where you don’t want to disturb others. In all these cases, subtitles are an intelligent wait to hold the attention of a wider audience.

3. The video can be accessed by people who don’t know how to turn the sound on

A recent survey carried out by Facebook shows that 80% of social network users react negatively to videos that automatically play with the sound turned on. If we consider that the platform has recently surpassed 2 billion subscribers and has decided to deactivate automatic audio playback and activate automatic video subtitling instead, we get a sense of just how important it is to provide subtitles for videos (see also: “Capture Attention with Updated Features for Video Ads”). This feature is still in its implementation phase, but will soon be available for all users.

4. The video is more accessible to audiences of non-native speakers.

There are many studies in the field of linguistics that demonstrate how adding subtitles improves message comprehension in foreign audiences who lack mastery of the video’s original language (see also: the results of this study by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). Just think of adverts where the actors speak with marked regional accents. In these cases, adding subtitles makes the message much more accessible to a foreign audience.

This last point also raises the question of how easy a video is to understand. We are very often led to believe that subtitles are only added to videos intended for a deaf audience. However, a recent survey by the BBC shows that most users who turn on subtitles have no hearing problems at all. The survey (available free here in PDF), was carried out on adult users and revealed that:

• 80% of people who use subtitles have no hearing problems
• 70% of subtitle users said they significantly improved comprehension
• most said they were happy with subtitles added “before” broadcasting
• most said they were not satisfied with live subtitles
• people use subtitles because they are useful when those on screen are not speaking clearly, when the audio is inadequate, or when technical terms and dialects are used.

Why does it benefit businesses to add subtitles?

Trying to make videos more accessible to users with hearing problems is not the only reason companies should put their money on subtitles. It acts a lot like a tool of inclusion for people with hearing loss. National and transnational governments are increasingly adopting laws that oblige public broadcasters to subtitle their videos. These laws will almost certainly be extended to private companies over time, and inserting subtitles is bound to become an obligation.

For now however, the demand for companies to add subtitles arises from other factors. Chief among these is the fact that adding subtitles means the video content will be indexed by search engines. In the audiovisual sector, indexed information is generally made up of metadata: titles, video descriptions, keywords. However, not everyone knows that subtitles can also be indexed. Google is unable to “watch” videos. This means that the large number of keywords that videos contain cannot be detected unless they are subtitled.

Case study: DNN

Discovery Digital Networks (DDN) is a multichannel digital TV network from the United States that produces shows from a variety of genres, and belongs to the Discovery Communications Inc. group, a world leader in producing audiovisual documentary content.

In 2013, DDN decided to add subtitles to its videos on YouTube, with the aim of gauging the value of the exercise. 125 of the 334 videos produced between January 2013 and April 2014 were subtitled. The video transcriptions were then published on 8 of the company’s channels. The results were monitored daily and based on the number of views before and after the videos were subtitled.

DDN saw a 7.32% increase in views overall. In addition, the company discovered that views peaked within 14 days following the exercise, with an increase of 13.48%.

What is more, to be certain that subtitled videos were indexed by YouTube’s search engine, the DDN team searched for a term which only appeared in the video subtitles, and not in titles, descriptions, or tags. The positioning was excellent (fourth result) and proved that YouTube had indexed the subtitled content.

Ultimately, if you want translate subtitles as a way of exporting your own product to foreign markets, success is guaranteed. Just think of the video Majorité Opprimé by Eleonore Pourriat, made in France in 2009, which received no more than a few hundred views in its first few months. The version subtitled in English was released on 5 February 2014 (a full five years later) and was an incredible success across the Channel, surpassing 8 million views in just 15 days.