Need Advice How much do subtitles matter?

[Yilk81]

I just edited the CC and cleaned them up so my first ever video has decent subtitles. I'm also thinking of adding Dutch, Indonesian and Italian subtitles as I know Dutch, my friend knows Indonesian and my partner knows Italian. Will this be time waisted or do you think this will open up the video to a bigger audience? Has anyone tried doing something similar and what were your results?

 

[SILTHW]

I have played around with this quite a lot. My biggest observation is that your niche may play heavily into your results.

For context I have been a global tech evangelist for some very large companies. I knew when I started my channel that a large part of my audience outside of the US. But I also knew that because my audience is a business/technical audience that most of them speak English well and frequently consume English content. I used Rev to translate into a few languages to see what would happen and learned that even my non-native English speaking audience watched in English.

So when I look at your list of languages, I don't know many people who speak Dutch that don't speak English at a very high fluency level. Same with Indonesian. Italian can be hit or miss.

Taking this back to niche, in my niche the people who watch globally are used to consuming my type of content in English. You will need to think about that in terms of your own niche.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

I edited captions and translated a large majority of my videos to two dozen languages last year. After a solid year of this my traffic from the US is at 83%... which kinda tells me that I saw a 17% uptick as a result of making my videos consumable for an international audience.

 

[amisclinic]

Translations are not 100 percent perfect. So would suggest to have it checked .
Its a bonus if you get even 1 more view with this.

 

[Yilk81]

@SILTHW That's a very good point you're making there. A large chunk of dutchies have no issues with english indeed so the return for all the effort might not be that great. Italians however could be a hit or miss as you mentioned now that I think of it some more. Everything in italy is in italian so people are just used to it and might not even consider clicking a video that is not in italian. Obviously there are some that will but in general it feels like a lost cause. Might as well use that time to work on other content.

Thanks all for pitching in.