YouTube wants to limit sharing of Shorts to TikTok/Instagram by adding a watermark

YouTube Shorts, which are a copy of TikTok with short vertical videos, scale and add a watermark. This is a way to deter creators from posting the videos on TikTok and Instagram (Reels).

Technically, a creator could still grab their YouTube Shorts and post them to TikTok and Instagram (Reels) if the mood takes them, but they should know that there will now be a watermark. This will indicate that the source is none other than YouTube.

Here is what declared a YouTube representative:

If you’re a creator who downloads their Shorts from YouTube Studio to share on other platforms, a watermark is now added to your downloaded content. We’ve added a watermark to the Shorts you upload so your viewers can see that content you share on other platforms is on YouTube Shorts. This feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks on desktop and we plan to expand it to mobile phones in the coming months.

When creators use a company’s technology to make a video, the platform wants to be credited as the source. TikTok has worked the same way for years, placing its recognizable red and blue watermark on any video downloaded from the app. The social media watermark features the creator’s handle, so if a viewer discovers the uploaded video on another app, they’ll be subtly redirected to TikTok. Also, the watermark moves across the screen, so cropping a video to make it disappear is impossible.