Gift for the loyal: YouTube Premium gives badges that just give joy

YouTube Premium starts to honor its loyal users with badges, given for various usage landmarks. They come in the form of beautiful animated cards. You can’t use them to get any special privileges on the video platform, but nevertheless a refreshing idea.

Now, one can easily imagine how the memelords will react upon hearing that YouTube is blessing the very people that are paying for the app with web cards of no practical value. But, hey, what’s the world without humor?

The first one to report the brand new feature (via 9to5Google) explains that upon opening the app, a colorful addition on the Home feed hailed: “Congrats on your new badge!” Tapping the message gets the user to the badge visualization – a fullscreen card with details about the reward. ‘All the badges are animated and generally amusing’, notes the user.

If you, too, got a badge these past days, but somehow ‘lost’ it, or you just want to admire it once again, here’s how to get to your badge collection: on mobile, tap your profile avatar (top-right corner), then navigate to ‘Your Premium benefits’. Obviously, this applies only for active Premium members. Sidenote: the one to report this update is an Android user, if you’re on the iOS team and you’ve also got a badge, don’t keep it to yourself and show off in the comments section.

It’s also important to address that these badges are on mobile for now, they do not appear to be live on the web version of YouTube just yet.

‘Gotta collect ‘em all!’

So exactly how many badges are there? While features of that kind do change their characteristics in time (if they stick around long enough and don’t suffer TikTok Now’s fate), as of now there are 19 badges. The first one is ‘Team Premium’, which is self-explanatory: your paid membership puts that one in your collection automatically. Next, there’s ‘Trailblazer’, which rewards you because ‘…you joined Premium within its first 2 years of launching’. The ‘10 million club’ is reserved for those that were among the first 10 million Premium members.

We’re not going to list every single one of the rest, but they are named like ‘Worry-free watcher’, ‘Gold/Platinum listener’, etc. One of the funnier ones is titled ‘Efficiency expert’, which is reserved for those with ‘30 hours of picture-in-picture’.

The giant’s next step

YouTube is on the constant go when it comes to additions, new features, and bonuses. Just the other week, the Google-owned video platform announced that it’s offering smoother 1080p video streaming for its Premium users.

Recently, YouTube also hinted at the possibility of hosting mobile and desktop video games – a clear sign that the giant wants to go bigger and step into new territories.