YouTube Closed Captioning & Subtitles: How to Add Captions on YouTube Videos

With 300 hours of video uploaded every minute, there’s no shortage of YouTube video player content. If your goal is to get your videos in front of a larger audience, there’s also no shortage of competition. So how can you make sure your videos are found by new viewers, especially now that YouTube is dropping support for community contribution captions? You can add your own subtitles & closed captions to your videos.

How to Add Captions & Subtitles on YouTube Videos

1. Go to the Order Captions page.

2. Click “YouTube” to use our integration.

3. Give rev.com access to your YouTube account. This is a secure system that allows us to download and upload your videos you want to add captions to.

4. Select the videos you’d like to have captioned. Then, click “Add Selected to Cart”.

5. This is where you have the option to automatically sync your YouTube channel with Rev for caption delivery.

6. Complete the checkout process. But first, select your “Output File Format”. Also, if you need to translate video captions into another language, there’s an option to order subtitles here too.

7. Click “checkout” and your caption order will be placed. Now you can go about your business while we handle the rest for you.

8. Once your file is finished, play the video in your YouTube video manager and you’ll see the captions or subtitles.

Rev now offers burned-in captions (open captions). Just check the “burned-in captions” box at checkout and you’ll receive a video with permanent, hard-coded captions added straight to your videos. Also available for foreign language subtitles!

What are the benefits of using the Rev YouTube integration?

Not only are videos captioned by professionals but those captions are uploaded directly to your video the second they are done, eliminating a lot of time-consuming admin work.

Authorize your account with our integration to pull videos from your YouTube channel to Rev for captioning. Or, for an added peace of mind, check the sync option setting in your account and we will automatically caption any new videos you upload to your YouTube channel. The majority of videos we caption are delivered back within 24 hours and our integration sends those .srt files (caption files) back to YouTube and adds them to your video.

What’s the easiest way to caption my videos?

When it comes to captioning YouTube videos, you have a couple options: do it yourself or upload a file and get a human or a speech recognition technology service to do it for you.

The thought of captioning videos yourself might sound overwhelming, especially if you have years of content living on your channel. Depending on how many hours of video you want to add captions to and how much time you’re willing to spend, this might be an option for you.

For most busy vloggers and marketers, an hour captioning content is an hour that could have been better spent.

But if you’re serious about video content, it’s important to make sure that every YouTube video you upload has quality captions to match.

Why add captions and subtitles YouTube videos?

There are several reasons why captioning YouTube videos is considered a best practice. Above all, videos with captions improve video accessibility, since they are accessible to a much larger audience than those without. Captions are also proven to increase watch time and improve SEO.

Adding subtitles is also a great way to grow your channel too. Many people use them interchangeably, but subtitles and CC (closed captions) are different. Subtitles are translations of what’s being said in your video (think of when you watch a foreign film). They’re a fantastic way to expand your YouTube video reach to an audience that speaks multiple languages.

If time is a concern, Rev’s closed caption integration with YouTube might be the right solution for you.