Blog

Notes on captions, translation, and Croatian on the web.

Stylised map of Croatian and adjacent linguistic regions in Europe with diaspora arrows.
Industry6 min

Croatian as a long-tail global language: the market math for podcast distribution

Six million native speakers sounds small. With linguistic adjacency, diaspora, and English captions, the realistic addressable audience for Croatian-source podcasts is 30 to 50 million, vertical-dependent. Here's the tier-by-tier breakdown with sources.

Side-by-side YouTube player frames showing auto-translated vs. native English captions over the same Croatian podcast moment.
Comparisons4 min

Why YouTube auto-translate fails on Croatian (and what that means if you license content from the region)

Three concrete failure modes, with measured WER from a 3-channel Croatian benchmark. If you're evaluating Croatian podcasts on the strength of YouTube's auto-translated captions, you are not seeing the asset.

Screenshot of the Google OAuth permission screen with parts highlighted.
Engineering4 min

What `youtube.force-ssl` actually asks for. And why

Google asks for a scary-sounding scope. Here's what we actually do, what we don't touch, and how to revoke access in two seconds.

Three caption files side by side, same text, different syntax.
Engineering4 min

SRT, VTT, .sbv: which caption format does YouTube want, and why

Three standards, two ways of writing time, one platform that accepts them all. A short reference guide and when to use each one.

YouTube Studio captions panel with three caption tracks highlighted.
Guides3 min

How to add Croatian and English captions to YouTube

Three paths from audio to captions: manual typing, YT auto-captions, automated pipeline. Time, cost, quality. No marketing, just numbers.

Chart of viewership growth driven by subtitles. Visualising the impact on YouTube metrics.
Industry7 min

Subtitles and viewership: what the numbers actually say (2014–2026)

A walk through the verified research on subtitle impact for YouTube. Which numbers are quoted correctly, which are mis-attributed, and what it means for Croatian-language content.