You add a watermark in the bottom-right corner. You upload to Instagram. The feed view crops your 16:9 video to 4:5, and your watermark is gone. You upload to TikTok, and the share/like/comment buttons cover your watermark. You upload to YouTube, and the progress bar obscures it during playback.
Each platform has "safe zones" where your watermark remains visible and unobstructed.
Platform-specific safe zones
Instagram Feed (4:5 crop of 16:9): The feed crops the left and right edges of landscape video. Place your watermark in the center 60% of the frame width (the sides get cropped). For vertical video, the bottom 15% may be obscured by the caption overlay.
Instagram Stories and Reels (9:16): The bottom 15-20% is covered by the username, caption, and interaction buttons. The right side has like/comment/share buttons. Safe zone: upper-left quadrant or center-left area.
TikTok (9:16): The right edge has floating action buttons (like, comment, share, profile). The bottom 15% has the username and caption. Safe zone: left side of the frame, above the bottom 20%.
YouTube (16:9): The bottom edge is covered by the progress bar and controls during playback. The top-right corner has a "more options" overlay in some contexts. Safe zone: the area between 5-90% width and 5-85% height.
Twitter/X: Minimal cropping for 16:9 content. Most positions work. Avoid the extreme bottom edge where play controls appear.
Facebook: Similar to Twitter. The feed shows most of the frame. Bottom-edge watermarks may be covered by video controls.
The universal safe position
If you publish to multiple platforms and want one watermark position that works everywhere:
Upper-left quadrant, approximately 5% from the left edge and 5% from the top edge.
This position survives: - Instagram's aspect ratio cropping (it is not near the edges that get cut) - TikTok's right-side buttons (it is on the left) - YouTube's bottom progress bar (it is at the top) - All platforms' bottom caption areas (it is at the top)
The trade-off is that top-left watermarks are less conventional than bottom-right, so they may look slightly unusual. But they survive every platform without modification.
Creating platform-specific versions
If you publish to multiple platforms regularly and want optimal watermark placement for each, the workflow is:
1. Create your video without any watermark 2. Add a bottom-right watermark for YouTube (using the MediaBrew watermark tool) 3. Add an upper-left watermark for TikTok/Reels (using the same tool with different settings) 4. Keep the unwatermarked original for platforms that do not need it
This requires extra steps but ensures the watermark is always visible and never in the way.
Watermark size across platforms
On TikTok (phone screens), a watermark that looks right on a 1920x1080 desktop preview may be unreadably small on a 375-pixel-wide phone screen. Design your watermark size for the smallest screen it will appear on. For vertical social media content, make the watermark slightly larger than you would for desktop YouTube content. If you need different positions for different platforms, process the same video twice with different placement settings in the MediaBrew watermark tool.