Google's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) YouTube recently announced it will start placing watermarks on users' YouTube Shorts videos as soon as users download them. Since users will often post the same video to other platforms, YouTube is taking advantage of this to better promote the video-sharing company's TikTok-like feature.
"If you're a creator who downloads your Shorts from YouTube Studio to share across other platforms, you'll now find a watermark added to your downloaded content. We've added a watermark to the Shorts you download so your viewers can see that the content you're sharing across platforms can be found on YouTube Shorts. This is rolling out over the next few weeks on desktop, and we plan to expand to mobile over the coming months." said a post highlighting new YouTube features.
The primary reason that YouTube is implementing this feature is that the company would like to have recognition as the videos' main sources. This particular feature has been put into effect in order to compete with other platforms, such as TikTok. Essentially, YouTube is concerned that YouTube Shorts in and of themselves will not supply sufficient enough material to properly compete with other platforms. So the company is instead making efforts to remix or remake regular YouTube videos into YouTube Shorts in order to make the content more appealing and engaging.
Since the inception of YouTube Shorts in 2020, YouTube has collected around $100 million to give out to those who create Shorts, which have been steadily growing in popularity as of late. Hopefully, YouTube's ultimate goal of increasing its level of popularity and garnering further audience attention will be achieved as it relies on YouTube Shorts to compete with other platforms.
The added watermarks will likely only help YouTube to achieve this goal as users are reminded that YouTube stands as the original source of the created videos. While platforms like TikTok and Instagram have already taken measures to further support themselves (I.e. Instagram's (NASDAQ: META) algorithm intentionally drowns out content that has watermarks from other platforms), YouTube is still in the mix in terms of competition for high quality video content creation.