Benefits of Captioning for Producers

1. Potential for a large international audience. People from all over are viewing captioned web tv! The flag counter below shows 30 different countries.
   
   
2. Increased viewership - Captioning has been proven to increase views. 
• Discovery Digital Networks - in this promotional article, a captioning service reports that adding captioning increased views by over 7 percent.  In this video, that captioning service explains the results of the Discovery experiment.
• In an article on Streaming Media, a YouTube product manager reports that in a test by YouTube itself, captioning was found to increase views by four percent. In addition, YouTube does NOT use automatic captioning when indexing videos. YouTube only uses edited captions for indexing. 
• You can get additional views for an older show by going back and adding captions.
3. Increased repeat viewership - Often, a new show will get many views as people check out the newest "hot" thing (especially if there has been media coverage) but subsequent episodes don't get as many views because people have moved on to the next hot thing. Having closed captioning can help ensure at least one type of viewer comes back again and again - the viewer who needs or wants captioning.
4. Increased viewing time - Subtitling/captioning has been shown to increase how much time people spend watching a video to completion. In a promotional article, ReelSEO reports on a captioning service study that demonstrates as much as a 40% increase in viewing time.
5. Helping Speakers of Other Languages Learn to Read - Captioning has been proven to help adults learning English as a second language. You can have the satisfaction of knowing you may have helped such people with their literacy skills.
6. Helping Children Learn to Read - Captioning has been proven to help children learn to read. You can have the satisfaction of knowing you may have helped a child to improve his or her reading skills. Learn about current research on the Captions for Literacy website.
7. Information Retention - Captioning has been proven to help people remember what they saw.
8. Privacy Aid - when your web series is captioned, someone watching in bed with a tablet can just turn off the sound and not disturb a sleeping partner.
9. Social Aid - with the growth of internet-enabled televisions, your web series will be understandable in noisy environments such as bars and gyms.
10. Accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Viewers - People with hearing losses depend on captions to help them understand videos. The total number of deaf and hard of hearing in the United States alone is estimated at over 30 million. That does not even include the growing numbers of aging baby boomers with hearing loss.
11. More Effective Marketing - Especially if you are a branded web series producer. Not captioning your branded web series means that you are missing out on the chance to sell your product to deaf and hard of hearing people.
12. Satisfaction - Your satisfaction in knowing you have done the right thing by captioning. Plus, if you pay for professional captioning, you will have the added satisfaction of knowing that you are creating and supporting jobs!