YouTube will be discontinuing Community Contributions. Community Contributions allows anyone to submit closed captions, and translated subtitles, title and description of your videos. That way your fans could help make sure your content is accessible in multiple languages.
Community Contributions will no longer be available after September 28, 2020.
Note 28 September, 2020: YouTube has announced improvements to creator captioning tools in the works.
Why are Community Contributions going away?
According to YouTube, there are two main reasons for this change:
- Low usage: in the past month, and was used by less than 0.001% of channels,with less than 0.2% watch time. If there are 30 million channels, that means only about 300 used the feature in the past month.
- Low quality: not just low quality contributions, but apparently also used for spam and harassment. A year ago YouTube stopped automatically publishing Community Contributions due to abuse and spam, so this has been an ongoing issue.
Unfortunately for those channels that did successfully use Community Contributions, there isn't a free alternative (although YouTube is arranging some special short-term deals).
How will the change affect YouTube Creators?
Community Tab in Channel Subtitles settings in YouTube Studio (I don't use Community Contributions)
- If you do not use Community Contributions, you will not see any change.
- This will not affect any published Contributions.
- You will still be able to upload your own captions or use YouTube's automated captions.
- You can still translate your own video titles and descriptions.
- If your channel has Contributions saved as drafts, you have until September 28 to publish them. You can find your drafts in YouTube Studio (studio.youtube.com) by clicking Subtitles on the left menu, and viewing the Drafts and Community tab.
- There are third party tools and services that offer captions and subtitling. YouTube has arranged special deals:
- Amara: Offers community contributions in multiple languages. If you have used Community Contributions for at least 3 videos in the past 60 days, YouTube will pay for a 6 month subscription. Keep an eye on the News card on your YouTube Studio Dashboard for details.
- 3PlayMedia: 40% discount ($1.75/minute English, $3.50/minute Spanish)
- Cielo24: $1/minute for English captions, $1.50/minute for 24 hour turn-around.
- Rev: 12% discount ($1.10/minute, 12 hour turn-around)
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