PSA: I finally admitted auto captions beat my handwritten hooks, and it only took me 11 days to get it
I spent 11 days last month rewriting hooks by hand for every video because I swore captions written by a person always beat the auto ones. Then I tested both on the same clip for a bakery in Toledo, the auto version pulled 3x the watch time and held people past the 3 second mark. I was so sure I was right that I almost deleted the test before it finished. Now I let the app do the first pass and I just fix the one or two words it fumbles. Has anyone else seen auto captions do better than a hand written hook, or was my hook just bad?
Saw a guy on YouTube break this down and he said auto captions win because they match how people actually talk, not how we think they talk. Your handmade hook was probably too clean, too planned out. The app just spits out the words the way ears expect them.