If you only make one edit to a Short, make it captions. A large share of short-form video plays without sound, especially on autoplay feeds — without on-screen text, your first three seconds are silent, and silence gets scrolled past.
Captions increase watch time
On-screen words give viewers a reason to stay even when their volume is off, and they make fast-paced speech easier to follow. More watch time means more distribution — the platforms push clips that hold attention.
Word-by-word beats a static block
Animated, word-by-word captions that highlight each word as it is spoken outperform a single static subtitle. The motion itself is a retention device — the eye follows the changing word.
Add them without the busywork
Manually timing subtitles is tedious. Generating them from the transcript and burning them in automatically takes the effort to zero, and lets you pick a style — clean, bold, boxed, or minimal — that matches your brand.
- Choose a caption style that fits your channel
- Keep lines short so they never cover the subject
- Export burned-in so captions survive re-uploads and downloads
Try it on a clip — captions are included on every plan, free ones too.