YouTube Expands Multi-Language Dubbing To Help Creators Reach New Audiences

When creators are trying to break through to new audiences, the go-to strategy is typically for them to repurpose and distribute their content to several social media platforms or leverage paid efforts such as ads. However, this strategy does not address a significant barrier to reaching new audiences: language differences. This is particularly relevant on YouTube, which has a global user base that speaks many different languages.

Dubbing Can Be Expensive & Time-Consuming

Some prominent creators like MrBeast have invested in dubbing services to create videos in various languages and then create dedicated multi-language channels. However, this can be expensive and, above all, time-consuming. For each new channel a creator adds, they also need to create additional thumbnails, post those videos, and manage those channels. It also fragments their audiences since viewers are scattered across multiple channels instead of having a central location.

YouTube’s Solution: Multi-Language Audio Dubbing

YouTube is looking to remove some of these barriers with an expanded rollout of a feature that will allow creators to easily add multi-language audio dubs to both new and existing videos, expanding their reach to international audiences. Better yet, this feature is easy to use and free.

When creators upload a video, they can now select the option to add additional audio tracks for over 40 languages. Once added to new video uploads or updated to existing ones, viewers can automatically watch the video in their default language. They can also search for multilingual content through video titles and descriptions, which are also translated.

During the testing phase of the feature, YouTube reports that creators saw over 15% of their watch time come from views in the video's non-primary language. Plus, on average, viewers watched over 2 million hours of dubbed videos daily in January of this year.

Creators Go Global

With somewhere between 13-17% of the world's population speaking English, this feature will be extremely beneficial for creators in the US as they have the potential to reach many more people by making their videos in languages other than English. This added viewership means that creators can expand to global markets, which can lead to increased ad revenue and merchandise sales, more branded content deals with companies that want to reach non-English speakers, and more. It can also help creators with potential burnout. Instead of having to post more videos, making their videos in different languages is an alternative.

Democratizing Content Creation & Consumption

Overall, the solution democratizes content creation and consumption for creators and viewers, which is not only beneficial to them, but also to YouTube, as it opens up opportunities for people of all languages to find and consume videos outside their primary language. This should lead to more watch time and engagement — which is essentially every platform’s goal.

If we think about the impact that closed captions and text translations have had on accessibility and reach, this will have an even bigger impact.

Lookout For Copycats

Currently, YouTube is the only major social platform that offers a solution like this. However, as we typically see, it's a copycat world, so we should expect that at least Meta and TikTok will eventually invest in a similar offering for their video experiences.