Where do you position the title of a video?

Question

When designing a video webpage, should the video's title be the heading of the entire page or should it be the caption of the video? How do you choose between the two? Below are two flagship examples of the opposing styles.

Caption

Vimeo places the title of the video underneath the video as a caption. Technically, their page has no heading. Will user's feel disoriented because the standard heading the upper left corner is missing?

Page Title

Currently, Youtube uses's the video's title as the page heading. I recall a year ago I was subject to one of their A/B tests, where the title was below the video as a caption. Since their current day design does not use the caption layout, does this mean the A/B test revealed that a video caption is suboptimal to a page heading?

Answer 1

It depends whether the video is the subject of the article / content, or whether it's just an accompaniment.

If the page or content is 'about' the video, adding the title to the top of the page helps give it a parental relationship to the whole page. You don't have to do it, but if you put the title below, follow Vimeo's example of not putting any headings or text above the video or at the top of the page (the heading is visually separate, so doesn't count).

On the other hand, if the video is just illustrates a larger article, the title needs to be attached to the video and nothing else. Putting the title under the video and binding it with a container is a good way to communicate that (putting it above could suggest the vid and the text following are a single contiguous section).

Answer 2

In general, a label at the top of a page/section labels that entire page/section. While a label below an element traditionally refers to that element. Take a look at most textbooks, and you will see the captions for diagrams below the diagram. Whether this is ideal or not doesn't change the fact that most people are used to that.

Regarding the Vimeo vs YouTube approach, I personally prefer the Vimeo approach as it is nearer the controls that I look at more.

However there isn't any clear winner between these two options, so the best is to test and see what works best for your target audience.