YouTube introduces an anti-TikTok watermark for Shorts

YouTube doesn’t want you to post its Shorts on TikTok. To prevent that, it introduces a watermark. For example, it is less attractive to post your video on TikTok (or Instagram Reels). Instagram has already indicated that it will put watermarked videos at the back of people’s timeline, and TikTok has some tricks of its own to prevent you from sharing the short videos elsewhere.

YouTube Shorts

While social media is starting to look more and more alike and imitate everything from each other, we also see that creators like to put their content on multiple platforms. However, those platforms prefer not to. Instagram already came up with the ‘innovation’ this week that you can create a Reel, but only after you have posted it you can also use it on TikTok. If you don’t post it on Instagram, you can whistle to the audio in the video.

We now see it more and more, watermarks in videos. There have been many attempts to watermark videos to discourage cross-posting. TikTok has been doing it for some time, but YouTube is now also joining in with its Shorts. YouTube will add the watermark if you download a Short from your account before sharing it to other platforms. On desktop it is already live, on mobile it will come later.

Remove logos and watermarks

As a video maker, you naturally want the largest possible audience for your short. After all, you put a lot of effort, time and love into it. So it becomes looking for apps that can help you remove watermarks, to fool these platforms and still be marked as original content (because that always scores better and always takes precedence in the algorithms). However, that is sometimes a challenge: some platforms have a logo that bounces around, making it less easy to crop your video to remove the logo.

What do you think of platforms that are hard-copying each other doing everything they can to make it difficult for you to share videos? Leave it now in the comments below this article.