Turn on and manage community contributions
Your community of viewers can help you reach a larger audience by adding title, description, subtitles and closed captions to your videos. Once you have same language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.
When content is submitted, you can manage it by reviewing, editing, publishing, flagging or rejecting it. Your community can also review the content, and it will automatically be published when it gets enough reviews.
Turn community contributions for videos on or off
Before your community can submit titles, descriptions, closed captions or subtitles, you need to turn on community contributions. You can turn on community contributions for selected videos or make it the default setting for all videos on your channel. Learn how fans contribute and review this content for your videos.
Follow these steps to turn on community contributions for all videos. Note that this change will reset any settings applied to individual videos.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio beta.
- From the left-hand menu, select Transcriptions.
- From the top, select Community.
- Select Turn on.
Creator Studio Classic instructions
Turn community contributions on or off with one click by going directly to your account, or follow the steps below.
Note: Following these steps to turn community contributions on or off will apply the setting to all videos – any setting applied to individual videos will be reset. You can still turn it off for individual videos.
- Click your profile picture
Creator Studio.
- On the left-hand side, click Translations and Transcriptions
- Click Turn on for all videos. If you don't see that option, click Settings
in the top right, then click Turn on for all videos. You may need to choose a default language for your channel first.
To turn off this feature for all videos, click Settings
- Sign in to YouTube Studio beta.
- From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
- Click the title or thumbnail of the video that you'd like to edit.
- From the left-hand menu, select Transcriptions.
- If you haven't, set the language for your video.
- Select the Community Contributions box and choose between On for this video and Off for this video.
Creator Studio Classic instructions
- Go to your Video Manager.
- Next to the video that you want to allow fan contributions to, click Edit.
- Under the video, select the Advanced settings tab.
- Under 'Community contributions', select Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC.
- Click Save changes.
To turn off this feature, untick the box next to Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC for the video that you don't want to allow fans to contribute to.
- Sign in to YouTube Studio beta.
- From the left-hand menu, select Videos.
- Tick the boxes next to the videos that you'd like to edit.
- Select Edit, then Community contributions.
- Choose whether you'd like them to be On or Off, then select Update videos.
Creator Studio Classic instructions
- Go to your Video Manager.
- Tick the boxes next to the videos that you'd like to edit.
- At the top of the page, click Actions
- Select Allow viewers to contribute translated titles, descriptions and subtitles/CC.
- Select Submit.
Manage community contributions
Once transcriptions or translations have been submitted, the content goes through a review process. YouTube moderates these submissions for spam and inappropriate content, while taking input from you and your community.
Once enough contributions have been added, the community will be asked to help review them. When that submission gets enough reviews, it's automatically approved for the video. This saves you time and lets your community experts help in their language.
Make sure that you review, edit, flag or reject content. You can also publish or delete content that's been approved.
- In the top right-hand corner, click on your profile picture, then Creator Studio.
- In the left-hand panel, click Translations and Transcriptions
- You can take the following actions: Manage contributions in progress
Remove or edit published content
To see submissions in progress, go to the In review tab and select Review next to the item that you want to manage.
- Approve and publish submissions: At the top of the page, select Publish.
- Edit submission: Make any corrections in the box below the submission. Select Exit to save to drafts or Publish to approve.
- Report spam or abuse: Select Report.
- Ask the community to make improvements: At the bottom of the page, select Needs more work.
Go to the Published tab and select View next to the track that you want to manage.
- Edit submissions: Select Edit. Make your edits and select Publish edits.
- Delete submissions for subtitles/CC: Select Actions
- Delete submissions for title and description: Go to Video Manager
Give credit to contributors
When you allow community contributions on your channel or video(s), we automatically publish the top contributors in the video's description. Contributors can only get credit if they have a YouTube channel and haven't already opted out of credits.
- The main five contributors per language are shown, ranked by their contribution to the published version.
- The contributor list is shown in translated versions of the video description (if applicable).
You can also see the list of contributors under the Subtitles & CC tab next to the version that they added to.
Note that currently only contributors to subtitles/CCs can be credited in this way.