When YouTube first launched, it was a place for people to upload their videos. Most people (including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, with his iconic Me at the zoo) uploaded their videos unedited, and were happy if they got a few thousand views.
But what was once a little website full of raw-cut flip phone videos is now a central hub of the $250 billion creator economy. And as our industry has grown, YouTube’s grown with it. Now, the Google-owned platform offers a whole suite of production and post-production tools–including tools that help YouTubers automatically subtitle and dub their content in multiple languages.
We’ve previously written about multi-language subtitles (which translate a creator’s content on their original video, on their original channel) versus channel localization (where videos are taken and rebranded into different languages, with new channels, titles, and thumbnails targeted at regional audiences). Since that article, YouTube has pushed further into generative AI and introduced the next step after subtitles: autogenerated audio dub tracks.
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For some creators, these dub tracks will be sufficient, in the same way YouTube’s on-platform editing and audience engagement tools are sufficient. YouTubers looking to level up, however, will have to tap the ever-growing market of creator services companies.
One of those companies is Linguana, a startup founded in 2023 by CEO Yuval Tal and CTO Oded Shafran. Its specialty is the aforementioned content localization. To localize, it partners with successful creators and launches brand-new YouTube channels targeting their biggest potential international audiences. (An English-language creator who sees significant potential growth from Germany, Mexico, France, and Brazil, for example, might choose to start by launching four localized channels targeted at those regions.)
Linguana’s international channel setup involves mirroring details like the creator’s bio, outgoing links, and other metadata–but, of course, the most important part is maintaining videos’ appeal in languages other than the creator’s native tongue.
This is where Linguana’s edge comes in, Chief Marketing Officer Jonny Steel tells Tubefilter.
Right now, creators who want to meet international audiences on their own language level have two options at opposite ends of the budget spectrum: YouTube’s default AI-voice dubbing, or going the MrBeast route and shelling out for professional voice actors.
YouTube’s default AI dubbing is the lowest strain on a creator’s wallet, and can be valuable for entry-level YouTubers. But there are quality issues: it can be “pretty flat and missing out on your emotion and personality,” Steel says.
“When there’s multiple speakers or a man and woman speaking, or adults and children, it can get the voices muddled,” he says. “The system is unable to separate them clearly, or sometimes it’s the same voice for multiple speakers.”
The end result can be that the translated video is “not a very good experience for viewers,” he says, which hurts a creator’s retention and watch time, and can potentially shrink their international growth potential.
On the high-budget end is human voice acting. “This is a really good option if you have deep pockets,” Steel says. “Voice acting costs sometimes $20 to $50 a minute. If you think about that, a creator with a lot of videos, doing this in a whole bunch of languages, it can be very difficult to see a real ROI.”
He emphasizes that if a creator has the budget to hire actors, “that’s great.” But for most creators, “It will be very difficult to make that profitable.”
Linguana comes in as a middle option. Steel claims its localized content, which is dubbed in AI trained on creators’ own voices, is far higher-quality than auto-dubbed videos, and also doesn’t require creators to invest the high up-front cost of hiring human actors.
“Our quality of dubbing is exceptionally high,” he says. This is because, on top of doing voice cloning, it does what he refers to as “emotional replication.”
“When someone gets really excited in the original language, the cloned voice gets excited with them,” he explains. “It can tell different people, different ages…” And overall, he says, Linguana’s dubbing adds “a lot of localization value.”
He openly says, though, that Linguana’s services (which don’t cost anything upfront; creators pay by splitting revenue on the localized channels) aren’t for everyone. He reiterates that creators early on in their journey will do just fine with YouTube’s default tools.
“If you’re a small channel, the auto-dubbing is great,” he says. “What we’re trying to do, is offer a premium product via a partnership model for a different audience of established creators.”
To that end, creators have to meet a certain engagement threshold to partner with Linguana. “We only tend to partner with creators who’ve already got pretty good momentum in their original language,” Steel says. “If we were to take a creator too small, it wouldn’t be profitable. We would just lose money, and the creator wouldn’t get a huge amount of value. We want creators who are already established, they already have a business. They’re investing in the next step.”
Linguana partners with creators when it can see itself providing value–and in some cases, that value adds up to “tens of thousands of dollars a month in new revenue,” Steel says.
One of the creators who’s worked with Linguana for localization is SLAV’s ADVENTURES, who’s gathered 3.6 million subscribers on his channel with content that merges gaming and internet culture with magnet fishing. Linguana built and manages 13 fully localized channels for him, reaching audiences that speak languages including Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
To date, these localized channels have brought over 60 million views, and has “generated meaningful new revenues for Slav,” Steel says.
We’ll have more case studies from Linguana soon, so keep your eyes peeled. Creators interested in working with Linguana can check it out here.
Linguana is a Tubefilter partner.
