As defined by YouTube:

“When you’re a creator who downloads your Shorts from YouTube Studio to share throughout different platforms, you’ll now discover a watermark added to your downloaded content material. We’ve added a watermark to the Shorts you obtain so your viewers can see that the content material you are sharing throughout platforms will be discovered on YouTube Shorts.”

Which may very well be good, I suppose, by way of cross-promotion. However with different apps additionally penalizing clips that embrace seen watermarks, the true intention would seem like limiting quick video sharing throughout apps, with a view to make it somewhat tougher for creators to easily re-post their Shorts to Reels or TikTok as properly, as a way to construct their presence in every app.

It’s value noting each TikTok and Reels additionally embrace watermarks on downloaded clips, in an effort to limit the identical, so it’s not shocking to see YouTube take an identical strategy. However nonetheless, it’s one other consideration – and with the present course of making it really easy to simply re-post your quick clips throughout every app, a type of low-effort baiting process, to see what you may get in consequence, it’s one other strategic consideration for creators.

YouTube says that it’s going to start including watermarks to Shorts downloaded on desktop from in the present day, with an growth to cellular coming quickly.