- Hello insiders, today we're gonna update you
about community captions.
As a reminder, community captions are going away.
We've got a lot of feedback
and it's clearly a very controversial decision,
but we wanted to at least try to explain the rationale
and address some of the feedback that we had.
That led us to this decision.
So, let's start with some of the feedback that we've heard
since we've announced this change.
For full context we have other videos
that we've talked about this subject
and they'll be linked in the description below.
But some of the feedback that we've heard
one of course is,
do not remove community captions.
The second one is,
we really want community captions as an option.
And three there were questions about
kind of how we came to the conclusion
from a data perspective,
or why did we look at this data
versus this other data, etcetera.
So our number one, like don't remove captions.
So just to clarify a few things.
We are in the business
of providing more captions on YouTube.
We wanna have more and more videos that have captions,
that are accessible to the deaf community.
And that's our goal, so nothing else.
We are not interested in less captions.
So the things that we're doing to drive
more captions are three.
One is, we wanna have an integration into the upload flow.
So when creators upload their videos,
they will hopefully be very aware
that adding captions is a good thing
and it gets more audience
and is great for more viewers to be able
to consume the content.
So that's the first thing that we'll be doing.
The second thing, we've already rolled out
or in the process of finalizing rolling it out.
But I think it's available to most creators now.
Is improvements to the creator captioning tool.
We will actually make it super easy to create captions
because we will seed the editor with the automated captions
at the correct timestamps, so it's really easy.
I've done it myself,
on the previous creator insider video
and I had to change a few words
that the automated system got wrong,
but it's basically you go in there you edit,
as you edit the player shows you exactly the right spot.
So you can hear what you said.
It's super easy.
So we're hoping that that will be a material change
it will drive a lot more captions.
And that's already been rolling out
I believe almost complete at this point.
And the third thing that we're doing,
is the new permission,
that will allow a creator to invite a trusted person,
to create captions on their videos,
without access to anything else.
So it will be a safe environment for the creator,
which will encourage them
to basically include more people from the community,
but in a trusted and controlled way
because at the end of the day,
the creator is responsible in their viewers eyes
for what's being said in captions.
Hopefully, between these three changes
that will be coming in the next month,
we'll be able to really drive up
the number of videos with captions
and of course not down.
And if it turns out that we
made a mistake with this decision,
then we will look at that decision again
and figure out what we can do.
And in the interim, we are funding creators
who've used community captions
so that they can use a third party platform
to get community captions.
The second point is that we're not removing captions
to achieve our goal.
That would be kind of silly to remove captions
over all if we wanna have more captions.
So we are not removing captions.
There are multiple ways
that captions are added to videos on YouTube today.
There's automated captions
and automated captions will continue
in the same way that they are today.
We're not expecting to have any changes
other than improving the system for automated caption.
And I should also clarify
that we were not looking at automated captioning
as a solution instead of human captions.
But we are always looking at it as like a different thing.
And we were comparing the sources of human captions.
There are two types of human captions.
One of them is generated from the creator,
who goes into his or her video and adds captions.
And then the second type of human captions
is the community captions.
And that's where the community
can provide captions for a given video
with a whole system to approve it, etcetera.
And we've talked at length in the previous videos
about the complexities with that system.
But that's the system that we are retiring.
So again, the source of captions
that's human captions from the creator is unchanged
and actually improved.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
The only thing we're changing is the community captions.
Other issues that have come up
with regards to community caption,
is the desire to have
the community be able to add captions
without the creator being involved.
And I think that that's been underlying
a lot of the desire to have community captions,
and this is a tricky area,
but at the end of the day
where we netted out on that question,
it's important that creators have control of captions
because they really are part of the video.
And the creators audience
will really hold the creator accountable
in the event that they have something
really bad in the captions.
And so, the idea that we can have
community contributed captions
without the creator's involvement
is just something that I don't think we will wanna do
and I don't think creators will want
that to have happened either.
So that might be a philosophical difference
that we have with some folks in the community as well.
There is a question of why now,
what's not broken, doesn't need to be fixed.
I think we've explained it in previous videos,
but just to touch on it again,
we've gone through a very significant
update to our infrastructure over the last few years,
creators have seen and that's the new studio
it's finished rolling out.
So all creators are now using the new studio.
There are a few features that are still on the old system
and community captions is one of them.
And we really have to wrap that up shortly
and just be done with the old system and retire it.
And so this is one of those last features
that we were needed to figure out
and I'll explain the logic
of why we decided not to move it over.
But that's the why now, answering the why now.
Okay, so then talking a little bit more about
the different types of captions.
So I think what I'll do is,
and I've shared this internally
with the YouTube employees as well,
but I wanted to show it externally.
So now we're gonna look at a chart
that shows the number of videos
with captions, human captions,
by the two types, creator generated or crowd generated.
And you can see how this, the number in red,
you can see the creator or this one shows creator.
The blue shows crowd,
and what's pretty stark here is the difference between them.
So the number of crowd videos on a given day,
you can see is basically like a blip at the bottom there.
It really does not register at all.
And the creator counts are tremendous.
So, just one more data point
of why we decided to really double down
on the creator generated captions.
The next graph shows you how the consumption
or watch time is different by the source of the captions.
This one does include automated,
but again, we made our decision based on the two types
of human captions.
So you can see that automated
is a pretty small relative to creator,
but again, the important thing is the crowd
in yellow is very, very small
related to creator on a percentage of watch time as well.
Those two data points really led us to the conclusion
that we should be doubling down on creator captions,
because that's where the captions are being created
and consumed by the viewers.
Hopefully that explains
the logic of the first point of feedback
which people really wanted to keep captions
and felt that there was a negative impact
on the deaf community
if we didn't have captions or community captions,
of course we're not retiring captions.
And we are only retiring community captions
because they simply did not generate a lot of captions
for our system.
So the second point of feedback that I mentioned,
there was all that is well and good,
but I still wanna have community captions.
And so we have some thoughts around that
and based on all the feedback
that we got and there was a lot of feedback,
we decided to find a third party
that we've announced already too,
that does provide a platform for community captions
because it doesn't have to happen on YouTube per se.
And so we decided to fund creators access to this system,
and there was some feedback
about how way YouTube is gonna make money off of this.
It's actually the opposite
where we're not gonna make any money,
we are just spending money to support creators.
If you've used community captions recently,
we will be paying for what we said
at the time was six months of this third parties system.
But based on the feedback, we've extended it to one year.
So, thank you for all the feedback
that six months might not be enough.
Now, the reason for the six months or a year is,
we think that we have a feature
that will provide a good amount
of the value of committee captions,
maybe not everything,
but certainly we'll get to a lot of the value.
And that's what we explained is a new type of permission,
meaning that in studio a creator can invite another person,
and only give them access to captions.
So they won't be able to delete a video or edit a video
or see the revenue or see analytics.
All they can do is add captions.
And so what that allows the creator to do
is basically outsourced captioning,
both same language and translated captions
to other people in the community, but they trust.
And so there is that issue of the creator
can still have control
and knows who's responsible
for basically what they're saying,
in other languages which in captions.
And so we are hoping to ship that over the next quarters.
And so that's one more reason why we extended
the third party, our payment for the third parties.
So that until that's there creators have another option
for community captions.
So hopefully that explains the second part of feedback,
which is like really wanting to have
a community caption like a functionality.
And then the third part of course,
is the data questions about the data
and I've shown them the graphs.
And the one of the important points is,
there was discussion about low percentage of watch time
that has captions.
And I just wanted to clarify that again,
we didn't look in absolute terms.
So the fact that it was,
I think it was 0.2% of watch time had captions.
That was not the data that drove the decision,
the data that drove the decision
was a comparison of the human caption sources,
the community caption and creator captions.
And seeing the huge difference between the two.
So, we wanted to clarify that point.
Obviously, there's gonna be less watch time
coming from folks in the deaf community
than the whole universe of viewers.
So, we know that and that wasn't the case.
So the other thing to talk about is,
I started with saying
that we want more captions in the system
and you could ask,
well, you're retiring one of the sources.
So how is that a good thing?
Well, by not spending time
on rebuilding the community captions
functionality onto the new system,
we can have more cycles to do other things.
So, hopefully that explains our logic at least,
and we may still not agree,
but hopefully over time we can update the community
with how we've been doing, how the numbers are looking.
And again, if the numbers are not looking good,
then we'll have to make a change.
Our goal is to have more captions, not less captions.
So, thank you and keep it real.