Stopped watermarking my work six months ago. Sales are the same, so is the stealing.
I used to put a translucent signature across everything I posted. Took maybe ten minutes per image, and I did it for years, mostly because everyone said to.
Six months ago I stopped, out of irritation more than strategy. The lines were ugly and they sat right on the paper texture, which is the whole point of the work.
Result: nothing changed. Two people asked about a print that was already sold, which is the normal rate, and I still find my images on a moodboard account with 90k followers and no credit. So the watermark never stopped that part either. I just had uglier photos of my own work.
Now I post a photo of the piece on the wall in my studio, slightly crooked, with the window light coming across it. Sales of the small ones went up a little. I think because it looks like an object that exists in a room rather than a file. Not sure that's the reason. But I'm keeping the crooked photo.
Curious whether anyone else dropped the watermark and regretted it.
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The thing that always interested me more is the second half of what you say: the watermark never stopped the stealing. Of course it didn't. The watermark was never about the thief, it was about the honest viewer, the one who already would have credited you. So what you actually removed was a small tax you were paying to the people who were going to do right by you anyway. That's the part people don't want to hear.
I do think there's a version where the mark is part of the work rather than a bandage on the photo of it. Chinese seal chops, the printer's colophon, Dürer's monogram, all of those are sign and image at once. But a translucent drag-and-drop signature has nothing to do with that tradition, it's just fear made visible. Yours sat on the paper texture, which was the whole point, so you were right to kill it.
Anyway, moodboard accounts are a strange kind of afterlife. Sometimes a print comes back to me from one of those with a buyer attached, so I've stopped being able to hate them cleanly.
The seal chop thing is where you lose me a little. A chop is carved once and it becomes part of the object, it sits in the material. A watermark sits on top of a photograph of the object, which is a different claim entirely. Dürer's monogram was on the plate, not on the print of the print.
But yes, the tax on the honest viewer, that part is exactly right and I had never thought of it that way. I have been putting my little signature across the corner of everything for two years and the two people who ever asked me about a print would have asked anyway. It is a bit depressing to read that back 🙂
Fair, and you're right about the chop. I reached for it because it's the closest thing in my own trade, not because it's the same. A chop is the object speaking. A watermark is me talking over the object. That difference is the whole argument and I blurred it.
The depressing part you read back, I'd keep it. It stopped being depressing for me around month two, when the ten minutes came back. That's ten minutes in the studio instead of over a photo, and the photos got better too, since the paper texture can actually be seen now.
The tax framing is right, and I hadn't put it that plainly. Ten minutes an image, years of it, all of it spent on the people who were already going to link back. That's the part that irritates me in hindsight.
But I'd hold one thing. A chop is carved into the block, so it's in the paper, in the ink, in the object itself. My signature was sitting on a JPEG of the object. Different layer entirely. When I was putting it on, I was marking the photo, not the work, and the photo was never mine to begin with in the way the paper is.