These are 5 reasons why your video needs subtitle.

As a new independent content creator, you must have felt how painfully complicated and time-consuming adding subtitle is. You need to typewrite, proofread, timestamp etc, before all the subtitling task is done. Besides the extra work addition, adding subtitle on your video offers you many benefits and surely improves your video quality.

Here we list down 5 reasons your video needs subtitle

1. Not everyone can listen to the audio

According to WHO’s data, there are approximately 466 million or 5% of world’s total population that have some sort of hearing problem, it means they will not able to enjoy your video if you don’t put subtitles. There are also people who want to watch your video in a noisy environment such as the subway, office, restaurant etc. By putting subtitles in your video, they can watch and enjoy the content of your video without turning on the sound.

2. Improving viewer’s comprehension

Have you ever watched a video although it’s in your native language but you still having a hard time comprehend what the speakers say? It’s because people have different comprehension on things that they hear, sometimes it’s a bit unclear. Subtitle helps them understand a lot better at these unclear parts of the videos, and able to get the information from the video correctly.

3. For Language Learning Purposes

The most exciting and effective way to learn new languages is through experiencing new kind of culture. However, many of us don’t have the chances to continuously be in other country to learn its language. So, this is where local programmes and tv shows comes to the rescue. There are many people who want to study foreign languages, English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese etc. By investing some time on subtitle, multi-language subtitle preferably, you’ll give them access to enjoy your video. Keep that in mind.

4. Improving SEO

As the internet consist of various search engines, adding subtitle to your video will help your SEO to track your video and subsequentially promote it more than videos with no subtitle. So, adding subtitle will guarantee your video gain more exposure and views as it will elevate your SEO ranking on the web.

5. Increase User Engagement

In 2009, PLYmedia researched that by adding subtitle to your video, it can increase the viewers watching time by almost 40%. Viewers will only watch 66% of your video if there’s no subtitle, and if you add one it’ll increase up to 91%. It means that it’s more likely for viewers to watch your content until the end if you take time to add subtitle.

Are subtitles worth the hassle?

Even though there are some extra process and effort to add subtitle to your videos, but we can say it’s certainly worth the hassle. If you want to add subtitle by yourself there’s some free recommended apps in the web that help you do the job nicely such as Aegisub. Luckily nowadays if you don’t want to do subtitle on your own, you can easily find freelancers that will get your job done on various freelancing platform across the net for only 5 – 15 USD / video.