YouTube wants everyone to know that you’re posting short-form Shorts videos on TikTok or Instagram Reels. In an update to the community help center, a YouTube team member announced that the website has begun watermarking Shorts downloaded from the Studio portal for creators. YouTube will begin watermarking Shorts you create on desktop in the coming weeks, before moving to mobile in the coming months.
After TikTok’s popularity skyrocketed, other internet companies realized that short-form videos were attracting the younger generation and quickly developed new products to rival the platform. However, if you spend time watching videos on several apps and websites, you can easily see that creators tend to repost the same videos across multiple services. For example, many Instagram Reels videos are also TikTok videos.
The Google-owned website said it has watermarked Shorts so that “viewers can see that the content [user] shares across platforms is originally YouTube Shorts content.” It looks like he hopes the new feature will raise awareness that it also hosts short-form videos and make you give it a try and give it preference over its competitors.
YouTube launched its short-form video format in India in 2020, before releasing it in 100 countries last year. A few months later, Shorts set aside $100 million to start paying its developers. By June of this year, YouTube said Shorts already had 1.5 billion active, logged-in monthly users. That number is far more than the 1 billion monthly active users that TikTok says reached in September 2021.
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