70 percent of all video views on global video platforms like YouTube come from foreign ISPs, yet 99 percent of the content is in English, explains dotSUB Founder and Chairman Michael Smolens. dotSUB seeks to make this English content available to everyone, offering a service that enables video on the web to be time-coded and captioned, and then subtitled into any other languages.
Smolens explains that non-native english speakers’ “level of understanding, comprehension, engagement and emotional connection with brands is significantly lower if communicated in a second or third language.” By captioning and translating video content, brands “can increase [their] potential audience with emotional connection by an order of magnitude.”
According to Smolens, there are three levels of value when it comes to video translation. The first is increased views. The second is SEO, as captions give search engines more to work with than simply a title and metadata tags. Finally, when videos are captioned and time-coded, videos become fully indexable. This is a major breakthrough for video advertising, as advertisers can serve up ads at the precise moment in a video where a topic or their product is being discussed.
