Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 3:55 PM PT

 

Where Have the YouTube Watermarks Gone?

You know how YouTube has its little logo overlaid in white in the bottom right corner of all its videos? Well, it seems to have gone missing. On both videos on and off the site, the files are playing free of any YouTube branding on top of the videos themselves. Meanwhile, the company logo has moved down into the frame of the player where the “menu” option used to be within embedded players.

I swear I asked YouTube’s Jim Patterson about this yesterday when I had him on the line to talk about the site’s new APIs. Would partners be dissuaded by the YouTube logo overlaid on top of all their videos, I wondered? He said the visible watermark was sticking around. Or at least that’s what my notes say. But now it seems to have disappeared.

The lack of a watermark would be a huge push towards YouTube being a white-label platform (literally) — especially now that the site’s APIs support “chromeless” players the are branded by the external sites where they live.

Screenshots below the jump.

Here’s a video from the site:

YouTube3

And here’s one embedded somewhere else:

Technorati

We did find one live player that still has the watermark, on a sponsored video on the front page:

YouTube2

And for contrast, here’s a screenshot of a video embedded offsite, with watermark intact, that we took yesterday afternoon:

screenshot16.jpg

Update: a YouTube spokesperson emails, “From time to time we experiment with different design styles to gauge our community’s response.”

Update 2: The watermarks returned sometime over the weekend.

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Comments & Trackbacks

  1. [...] ליוצרי התוכן, אבל גם רעבים עדיין. Liz Gannes מ-NewTeeVee מספרת היום על הצעד הקטן והמבריק של YouTube, האנשים שמבינים טוב מכולם [...]

    רק רשת » ארכיון הבלוג » גם בריאים, גם עשירים, גם חכמים… on March 13th, 2008 at 5:45 pm - Permalink

  2. after reading this post I headed directly to Youtube to find to logo there.Surprising I did not notice this before.

    newteevee reader on March 13th, 2008 at 6:17 pm - Permalink

  3. liz, awesome reporting — looks like you have a big one here! i wonder if it’s a real change or just a “blip” in the system???? If they really lost the watermark, it will make the platform much more attractive. Next, they need to improve the quality of the embedded files.

    keep up this eagle eyed work!

    Andy

    andy plesser on March 13th, 2008 at 7:12 pm - Permalink

  4. My bet is that this was a move to make the bottom 1/5 overlay ads more attractive. They still have the small button branding on the flash player, which is what Dailymotion and others who have been doing for a while.

    Frank Sinton on March 13th, 2008 at 8:30 pm - Permalink

  5. they still have it on the so-called “white label” chromeless player… so it seems that some kind of branding is important for them.
    http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/chromeless_example_1.html

    Eyal on March 13th, 2008 at 9:39 pm - Permalink

  6. Frank I agree with you on the coincidence of the ad and the watermark — it was getting a little crowded.

    Liz Gannes on March 14th, 2008 at 10:02 am - Permalink

  7. Heh. You have a screen shot of my dogs dressed up like Star Wars characters. :)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6UoVlfGnv8

    Chris on March 14th, 2008 at 11:43 pm - Permalink

  8. I noticed this too and was really excited, only now the watermark is back. Too bad. It looked really good without the mark, especially on the new high quality vids.

    Free on March 15th, 2008 at 1:24 pm - Permalink

  9. When you have ads, who needs watermarks? :)

    Mike Abundo on March 17th, 2008 at 4:20 am - Permalink

  10. Watermarks seem to be back :(
    BTW, anyone knows whether a video viewed within a player built on top of youtube player APIS is clickable towards youtube site?

    David Berrebi on March 19th, 2008 at 10:52 am - Permalink

  11. YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.

    YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.

    Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.

    Product page: http://www.youtuberobot.com
    Direct download link: http://www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
    Company web-site: http://www.youtuberobot.com
    E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com

    steveking on March 24th, 2008 at 1:02 am - Permalink

  12. YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
    Product page: http://www.youtuberobot.com
    Direct download link: http://www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
    Company web-site: http://www.youtuberobot.com
    E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com

    steveking on March 24th, 2008 at 1:04 am - Permalink

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