YouTube Shorts will be watermarked soon to raise awareness

The YouTube development team wants everyone to know that you simply repost your YouTube Shorts to other platforms (eg TikTok or Instagram Reels), so they plan to start soon adding watermarks to the Shorts you download from the service. The start will be made with the Shorts created on the desktop and in the coming months the mobile applications of YouTube will take their turn.

With TikTok's popularity skyrocketing in recent months, the rest of the Internet's powerhouses have found that these short-form videos have won over a new generation of users and have moved quickly to develop similar products for their platforms. If you spend time watching such videos on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok you will have found that many of them are precisely the same, so they have simply been reposted by the creators.

Google believes that it will significantly help its service to show the origin of videos with a watermark, hoping that it will be able to motivate TikTok and Instagram users to stay on YouTube to watch such videos.

YouTube Shorts was first added in India in 2020 and expanded to over 100 countries just last year. Within a few months, Google approved a $100 million creator reward program and even last June announced that more than 1.5 billion users watch YouTube Shorts every month.