Scrolling through your social media feed and encountering TikToks cross-posted to Instagram as Reels (before eventually, everything ends up on YouTube) isn’t exactly something out of the ordinary. Sure, maybe you’ve already seen the creator’s work on its original platform, but users in general don’t seem to mind the repetition. Developers are another story, and we’ve already seen attempts to watermark videos to discourage cross-posting. Unlike TikTok, YouTube hasn’t been placing a watermark on Shorts videos thus far, but that’s all changing now.
In a support thread announcing the changes to the platform, YouTube notes that the watermark will be added to Shorts creators download from their accounts before sharing it to other platforms (via TechCrunch). The change is already going live on the desktop, and mobile users will also see the change in the next few months.
Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, among others, have struggled to curate original short-form video content, mostly because creators making videos for one platform are eager to reach as many eyes as possible, and that means posting on multiple platforms to maximize engagement. Rather than starting fresh on each, it makes a lot of sense to just edit your footage once, and then re-upload.
To dissuade people from doing just that, and guide views back to the original source of their favorite content, platforms like TikTok have a well-implemented watermark system. That distinctive logo bounces around, so it can’t easily be cropped and removed. It also shows the creator’s handle on the platform, so if a video is downloaded and shared, viewers can readily find the original version on TikTok. A watermark for original Shorts content could serve a similar function.
Unless you, as a creator, prefer the video editing tools on a particular platform, working around the watermarks is also simple enough — if not a tad more cumbersome. You could always resort to third-party video editors like LumaFusion or Adobe After Effects, and export the same video separately for each social media platform. That way, you wouldn’t be cross-posting with watermarks.
That said, our workaround may not be feasible for everyone, and we’re sure plenty of creators will just continue to cross-post their short-form video content, watermarks or not.
