YouTube rewarding loyal Premium Subscribers with a free 1-year YouTube Premium

Streaming giant YouTube is reportedly gifting a free 1-year Premium subscription to its loyal customers who had been paying for the paid service of the platform since its launch about 6 years ago. 

A Redditor who subscribed to YouTube’s paid plan in early May 2016 and continued his membership without any interruptions got a pleasant surprise on  opening the YouTube Music app on an Android smartphone. 

He was greeted with a pop-up message titled ‘Time to celebrate’. It states that since he has been using the service for exactly 2222 days (or precisely 3,199,680 minutes which is 6 years and 1 month), YouTube thanks him and appreciates the unwavering support by offering a 12-months free Premium subscription.

The Redditor began his subscription in May 2016 when YouTube’s paid plan just started to roll out globally. At that time it was called ‘YouTube Red’ and it got rebranded to ‘YouTube Premium’ 2 years later in June 2018.

“So I was just randomly opening my phone to cast music on my Google Home and received this message out of nowhere. I did got credited for 12 months. Thanks I guess?” wrote Mental-prison, the person who shared a snapshot of the YouTube message on Reddit. 

In India, YouTube Premium Individual tier costs Rs 1,290 annually. It offers an ad-free streaming experience, background playback, access to all YouTube originals, more than 80 million official songs plus live performances, covers, remixes and offline playback by downloading videos and music. 

As of publishing this story, there are no other reports of users receiving such gifts, indicating that there might be some other eligibility requirements. To check how long you have been a YouTube Premium subscriber, you need to tap on your profile picture in the YouTube app and open ‘Your Premium Benefits’.