3 Reasons to Caption Your Videos

1. Accessibility
Of course, this is the #1 reason why video should be captioned or subtitled* online. If you are trying to get a message out to a large audience, you should make sure everyone in your audience can see your message.

2. Marketing Value

The text of captions or subtitles becomes a reference text for the web - basically, Google and other search engines search all text on the web, and that includes captions. Your caption text file will have marketing value for you because it will enable Google and other search engines to point people who are searching for you in the right direction. A video with no captions can only be indexed by search engines via the title, tags, and description. Check out this Business 2 Community article for more information.

3. Ease of Reference
Captioning your videos means you can easily find them later, and you can pinpoint exactly what you're trying to find within a video without playing it all the way through. The Daily Show uses closed caption files to hunt down specific clips they want to use on the show, according to this article on User Interface Engineering.

* The difference between captioning and subtitled can be subtle and some people use them interchangeably while others differentiate. In general, a captioned video means that text will display all sounds that occur on screen, and words exactly as they are spoken. Subtitles will often subtitle only the spoken word and may also be translated into other languages.