Introduction
Adding a watermark to your YouTube video through YouTube does more than just add a little personal branding to your video. It’s also a great way to grow your subscriber base, as anyone who hovers over it will see the button to subscribe to your channel. However, there are some very specific guidelines you have to follow to create your image, otherwise it won’t look right on your video. Examples of all instructions in the steps can be seen in both the YouTube video and image collection below.
Steps to Add a Watermark to YouTube Video
- First, you’ll need to create a graphic that’s scaled up at a 1-to-1 ratio and a minimum of 150-by-150 pixels, is either a PNG, non-animated GIF, BMP or JPEG, and that’s 1 megabyte or less. You’ll also need to adjust for whether or not you want a transparent background. In this example, I’ve created a 450 by 450 PNG image with a transparent background. The transparent background reduces the screen real estate of the watermark, but will ensure the text pops out.
- After creating your image, navigate to your YouTube Studio home page, and then click “Customization” in the menu on the left side of the screen. The Channel Customization screen is displayed.
- Choose “Branding” in the menu at the top and then scroll down to Video Watermark, and then click “Upload” next to Video Watermark. An Open dialog box is shown.
- Navigate to where your YouTube watermark image is located, select it and then click “Open.” A preview screen is shown where you can adjust the size and location of where your watermark will appear in the corner of your video. In this example, I’m not making any adjustments and will click “Done.” You’ll return to the Branding page, where you’ll see a preview of your watermark added in the Video Watermark section. From here you can choose whether you want your watermark displayed at the end of your video, you want to set a custom start time, or if you want it displayed for the entire video. In this example, I’ll choose “Entire Video.” Click “Publish” when you’re done.
Now, when anyone watches one of your videos they’ll see your watermark in the lower right corner of the video. If you end up with a watermark that looks too small, it’s likely because you didn’t adhere to a 1-to-1 scale and use a minimum size of 150-by-150 pixels. If your image looks fuzzy, you may want to scale up to a larger size while staying inside of the 1 megabyte limit, which is why I chose to use a 450-by-450 pixel image so it would be more crisp.
