YouTube figured out that its shorts are getting cross-shared to other apps and they want to be credited. A new watermarking feature is rolling out where when you download a video from YouTube Shorts, it will have a YouTube watermark.

A YouTube community manager shared the news yesterday on a support thread.

The post read:

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• 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”

Short-form video sharing platforms like TikTok were way ahead of YouTube by having watermarks and the creator’s username so viewers can easily go to the app to find the original video. TikTok took an extra step by making sure that the watermark bounces around the screen if someone tries to crop it out.

Meanwhile, Instagram is using a different approach, they stated that it will suppress content that has another app’s watermark to help users ‘rank for originality’. For serious creators, this means editing videos from third-party apps like VideoLeap which then enables the creator to share the same content across multiple platforms without worrying about watermarks.

The YouTube Shorts watermark will begin rolling out in the next few weeks on desktop and expand to mobile soon.