Video description
Also known as: caption text, post text
The text published alongside a video, which carries context, credits and links, and which almost nobody reads past the first line.
Updated
What it means
A description does three jobs at once. It tells a viewer what they are about to watch, it credits whoever was involved, and on some platforms it is searchable text that affects whether anything finds the video.
Only the opening is read. Platforms truncate it after a line or two, and the part behind a tap is effectively a reference section rather than something anybody consumes.
It is where obligations live. A Music license that requires attribution is satisfied here, and so is naming the riders, which matters more to the people in the footage than to the audience.
How it works in practice
The first line is the only one with a job. Where the session was, what the sport is, and anything at all that makes somebody start watching rather than keep scrolling past it.
Credits go underneath it in a fixed shape. Riders, filmer, location and track, written the same way every time, which turns a chore into a template rather than a decision.
Writing it immediately is the practical rule. The details are available while the edit is fresh and gone a week later, which is also why Post scheduling prepares everything in advance.
What to watch out for
Links are treated with suspicion. Several platforms reduce the reach of posts that send people elsewhere, which is one of the better documented triggers for a Shadowban style limit.
Keyword stuffing is detected and then ignored entirely. A paragraph of search terms does nothing at all except signal that somebody tried it, and the Recommendation algorithm has been ignoring that approach for years now.
A credit is not a licence. Naming an artist satisfies a courtesy and does nothing at all about the rights, and this is the single most common misunderstanding about music in video descriptions.
How RawClip handles it
Text around a video belongs to the person publishing it, since the names, the location and the links are all things an edit cannot know. The sequence is what has to hold attention once somebody has decided to start watching it.