Case study: moving captions out of the UI dead-zone cut rewatches the bad way

Case study: moving captions out of the UI dead-zone cut rewatches the bad way

A channel's captions sat in the lower third — right under YouTube's title/CTA overlay on Shorts. Viewers couldn't read them. We raised captions to the center-upper third on 18 Shorts.

Result: comments asking 'what did it say?' dropped to near zero; avg view duration up 7% (no re-reading struggle).

Pros:
— Pure layout fix, 2 min/short in CapCut
— Safe-zone overlay guide made it foolproof

Cons:
— Center captions can cover faces — needs per-clip judgment

Price: free.

Verdict: audit your safe zones — the bottom 15% and right edge are eaten by UI. Do this. No reason to skip; it's free and fast.