YouTube Shorts seem to prove that the vertical video format is very popular. A few months ago, Google revealed that their fledgling YouTube Shorts had reached over 1.5 billion monthly active viewers.
Google also continues to focus on vertical video content by including a feature to convert regular videos to Shorts. They have also insisted on content creators to come up with original content instead of republishing videos from other platforms.
Recently, YouTube will include a watermark on Shorts videos if content creators download them to share to other platforms. According to them, this is for followers and viewers to know that these videos can also be watched on YouTube Shorts and not exclusively on competing platforms like TikTok.
But this watermark will only appear if the video is downloaded only, unlike TikTok which always displays the watermark regardless of their platform or when it is downloaded.
For now, this feature will be available to content creators through YouTube on desktop and will be expanded to mobile devices in the coming weeks.