YouTube starts watermarking shared Shorts videos

YouTube wants everyone to know if you're just posting your Shorts to TikTok or Instagram Reels. In an update on its Community Help Center, a member of the YouTube team announced that the website has started adding watermarks to short films downloaded from its Studio portal for creators. YouTube will begin watermarking the shorts you create on desktop over the next few weeks before expanding to mobile over the next few months.

After TikTok's explosion in popularity, other internet companies realized that short videos had won over the younger generation and quickly developed new products to compete with the platform. However, if you pass time-consuming videos across multiple apps and websites, you can easily see that creators tend to repost the same videos across multiple services - many Instagram reels, for example, are also TikTok videos.

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The Google-owned website said it watermarks Shorts so that "viewers can see that content [the user] shares across multiple platforms is on YouTube Shorts." It looks like it hopes the new feature can raise awareness that it also hosts short videos and inspire you to try and use it over its competitors.

YouTube first launched its short video format in India in 2020 before releasing it to 100 countries last year. A few months later, he set aside $100 million to start paying the creators of Shorts. In June this year, YouTube said Shorts already had 1.5 billion monthly active and logged-in users, which is far more than the billion monthly active users TikTok said it reached in September 2021.

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