Google CEO Sudar Pichai said the company’s cloud storage service Google One is set to “surpass” 100 million subscribers.
Speaking during Alphabet’s Q4 2023 earnings call, Pichai added that the company is looking to add more AI-powered features to its Google One service. The search giant first launched Google One in 2018. Since then, the product has evolved and has added perks like Google Photos editing features like magic eraser, portrait light and portrait blur, color pop and sky suggestion.
Google One plans start at $1.99 per month, which gives you 100GB of storage that can be shared with five people and access to the VPN service in the US
Pichai noted that Google’s overall subscription business — including YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV and Google One — is on an upward trajectory and has surpassed $15 billion in annual revenue. The company said that this is a 5x jump compared to 2019. It also added that due to strong subscription performance, the “Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices” segment has grown 23% year-over-year.
Google last reported that YouTube’s paid plans had 80 million in November 2022. But there hasn’t been another update since then. The company reported that YouTube Shorts are watched by 2 billion connected users each month and 7 billion play daily — the same numbers noted in Google’s Q3 2023 results.
Earlier this month, Google laid off nearly 1,000 employees in divisions including hardware, engineering and services and 100 employees from YouTube. Pichai later sent an internal memo to staff saying there would be more job cuts this year.
Specifically, in its earnings call, Google said it had 182,502 employees, slightly more than the 182,381 employees it reported in its third-quarter earnings call. However, the number is significantly lower than the 190,234 employees it had at the end of 2022.
Google’s $65.5 billion in ad revenue fell short of analysts’ expectations of $65.8 billion despite an 11 percent year-over-year increase. Shares of the company fell 4% due to this failure.
