The short version
Human-made captions by upload year
Of the captioned videos uploaded in each year, the share whose delivered transcript came from a human-made track rather than YouTube's speech recognition. Only years with at least 400 videos in the sample are shown (2011 to 2026).
Read each bar as "of the videos from that year that people asked ScriptHaul for". It is not a census of YouTube, and the sample shifts as people request different channels, so a bar can move by a point or two from one day to the next.
Videos with no captions at all
The share of videos in each upload year for which YouTube had no caption track of any kind, human-made or automatic. A video lands here when auto-captioning was switched off, failed, or has not run, or when the audio has no recognisable speech.
How many caption tracks a video has
Most videos have exactly one track, the auto-generated one in the spoken language. Extra tracks are human uploads: the creator's own transcript, a corrected version of the automatic one, or translations. "6+" gathers every video with six or more.
Languages
The first table counts the language of the caption track ScriptHaul actually delivered, so it reflects what visitors asked for as much as what exists. The second counts every human-made track on the captioned videos, whatever was requested, which is the better picture of where creators write their own captions.
| Language | Videos | Share |
|---|---|---|
| English | 368,754 | 81.3% |
| Spanish | 27,564 | 6.1% |
| Hindi | 21,480 | 4.7% |
| Arabic | 7,504 | 1.7% |
| Portuguese | 5,812 | 1.3% |
| French | 5,280 | 1.2% |
| German | 4,892 | 1.1% |
| Russian | 4,662 | 1.0% |
| Japanese | 4,633 | 1.0% |
| Korean | 2,751 | 0.6% |
| Language | Videos | Share |
|---|---|---|
| English | 35,712 | 51.8% |
| Spanish | 5,178 | 7.5% |
| Chinese | 4,820 | 7.0% |
| Portuguese | 4,293 | 6.2% |
| German | 3,566 | 5.2% |
| French | 3,391 | 4.9% |
| Arabic | 3,116 | 4.5% |
| Japanese | 3,094 | 4.5% |
| Russian | 3,063 | 4.4% |
| Hindi | 2,648 | 3.8% |
Translation refusals
YouTube can translate a caption track on the fly into another language. Since July 2025 it has refused a share of those requests from anonymous clients at random, with a generic error, a behaviour documented in yt-dlp issue 13831. When that happens ScriptHaul delivers the original-language track instead and labels it, never a silent substitute. Across 38,925 translation requests so far, 12,259 were served and 26,666 were refused, a refusal rate of 68.5%. A further 41,661 requests asked for a translation of a video whose track cannot be translated at all.
Method and caveats
- What the sample is. Every unique public video that a visitor, an API user, or an assistant has asked ScriptHaul for, counted once, however many times it was requested. It is skewed toward English, toward recent uploads, and toward channels people want transcripts of. Treat every figure as "among videos people wanted transcripts for", not as a measurement of all of YouTube.
- Human-made versus auto-generated. YouTube marks each caption track as either automatic speech recognition or not. Everything that is not automatic is counted here as human-made: uploaded by the creator, edited from the automatic draft, or contributed. A "delivered" track is the one ScriptHaul chose for the requested language, preferring a human-made track when one exists in that language.
- No captions means YouTube listed no caption track for the video at the time it was fetched. Auto-captions can appear later, so a small share of these would have captions today.
- Years use the video's publish date. Years with fewer than 400 videos in the sample are left out so one channel cannot dominate a bar.
- Refreshed daily. Every number is recomputed once a day from the full set, and the counts only grow. The figures are also available as JSON at /api/research/captions.
- Privacy. Only aggregates are computed and published. No video, channel, or visitor identifier is stored with, or derivable from, these numbers.
Citing this page
ScriptHaul, "YouTube Captions Report", retrieved 13 October 2026, https://scripthaul.com/youtube-captions-report
Quote any figure with the date, since the numbers move. Questions about the method go to support@scripthaul.com.