Profile videos are now protected

Videos are some of the most valuable content an advertiser puts on a profile. They take time to make, they build trust with clients, and they are exactly what content thieves look for. Copied videos end up on fake profiles and scam sites, often within days. This week we rebuilt how videos are delivered on RedLightAd so they are much harder to take and reuse.

A watermark that is part of the picture

When a visitor opens a video, the copy they watch now has a RedLightAd watermark burned into the picture itself: our logo in the centre and a faint diagonal "redlightad.com" pattern across the frame.

Burned in means it is not a layer on top of the player that can be hidden with a browser trick. It is part of every frame. If someone records or rips the file anyway, the watermark goes with it, and anyone who sees the video elsewhere can tell where it came from. The pattern is placed slightly differently on each video, which makes it harder to crop or paint out.

Clean previews on cards

Watermarks are great for protection, but nobody wants a wall of logos while browsing. So we split videos in two:

• Previews on cards, carousels and profile tiles are short, clean clips: the first few seconds, small, without sound. They show what a video is about without giving the full thing away.
• The full video only plays when a visitor opens it, and that is the watermarked copy.

Browsing stays clean and fast, and the full-quality content is protected where it matters.

Signed links that expire

Before, a video's address could be copied out of the page and shared, embedded or downloaded by a script. Now every video plays through a signed link that:

• is only valid for a short time (minutes, not days),
• only works for that one video,
• only works from inside a page on our site, not when opened directly or embedded elsewhere,
• is checked against our rate limits and our list of blocked scrapers.

A player that stays open simply renews its link in the background, so viewers never notice. Someone trying to collect links in bulk gets addresses that stop working almost immediately. New uploads are kept in private storage that the public cannot read directly.

No download button

Our players no longer offer download, picture-in-picture, casting or a right-click menu. That will not stop a determined person from filming their screen, and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does is remove the one-click ways that most copied content gets taken, and the watermark covers the rest.

Why this matters for advertisers

If you advertise with us, your videos are your work and your brand. Protecting them means:

• fewer fake profiles built from your content,
• a clear mark of origin if your video shows up somewhere it should not,
• less reason to hold back your best material.

You do not need to do anything. Uploads go to protected storage automatically, and the watermark is added to opened videos for you. Premium profiles can show video as their profile picture and add many videos to the profile, so this is a good moment to add more.

Found your content somewhere else?

If you see your photos or videos used on another profile on RedLightAd, report the profile and we will look at it. Reports are confidential. For anything else, the Help & Contact page has the answers and a direct line to our team.