The end of the year is the time to look back and reflect, and while Spotify Wrapped and its ilk tend to grab the spotlight, YouTube Premium is letting its users take a look at just how many hours they've been watching and listening to videos with their subscription with the new "Your Premium benefits" stats page. It's easy to access and the numbers are fun to compare with friends and family — I am the queen of downloaded video, but my coworkers have me beat on sheer number of ad-free hours watched — so find your numbers and start coming to grips with your video addiction!
How to find how many hours you've watched YouTube Premium
- Open the YouTube app on your phone.
- Tap your profile picture in the top right corner.
- If you don't see this option, the feature might not have rolled out to your device yet. So far the only device we haven't seen it on is the Galaxy Fold 2.
You'll see the overall stats of your viewing so far with YouTube Premium. These numbers are pretty self-explanatory — especially since if you tap them you reveal a definition underneath that category — but there's a few notes to keep in mind here:
- If you cleared your watch history, that purges the videos/time from your stats, too.
- Videos watched in incognito mode and while watch history is paused don't contribute to these numbers either.
- If you're the YouTube account logged in on the family TV, your account gets the watch history and the stat boost from everyone watching on the big screen, so if your hours look too high for just you, that might be why.
I wish these stats gave us more of a Spotify Wrapped-style roundup of the creators or videos we watched the most, but maybe we'll get that next year. One thing's for sure: after seeing the number of hours watched, I'm more sure than ever that I get my money's worth out out of my YouTube Premium plan.
YouTube Premium
Ditch the annoying ads and get offline playback, too.
YouTube Premium has been around for years, and once you try it out, it gets very, very difficult to go back to the basic experience with pre-roll and mid-roll ads. YouTube Premium also gives you the option to watch videos on your phone with the screen off, download videos for watching offline, and you also get YouTube Music Premium, so you get a full-fledge music subscription in addition to the biggest video library on the web.
Ara Wagoner was a staff writer at Android Central. She themes phones and pokes YouTube Music with a stick. When she's not writing about cases, Chromebooks, or customization, she's wandering around Walt Disney World. If you see her without headphones, RUN. You can follow her on Twitter at @arawagco.
