Google CEO Sudar Pichai said the company’s Google One cloud storage service is “on the cusp of surpassing” 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 additional perks including Google Photos editing features like magic eraser, photo light, photo blur, color pop, and sky suggestion.
Google One plans start at $1.99 per month, giving you 100GB of storage space that can be shared with five people and access to its US VPN service.
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 5-fold jump compared to 2019. It also added that due to the strong subscription performance, the “Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices” segment registered a 23% growth year-on-year.
Google last reported that YouTube paid plans reached 80 million in November 2022. But there has been no further update since then. YouTube Shorts is viewed by 2 billion logged in users each month and 7 billion plays daily — the same numbers reported in Google’s Q3 2023 results, the company reported.
Earlier this month, Google laid off nearly 1,000 employees in departments including hardware, engineering, and services and 100 employees from YouTube. Later, Pichai sent an internal memo to employees saying there would be more job cuts this year.
It is worth noting that Google stated in its earnings statement that it has 182,502 employees, which is slightly more than the 182,381 employees it mentioned in its third-quarter earnings statement. However, the number is significantly lower than the 190,234 employees at the end of 2022.
Google’s advertising revenue of $65.5 billion came in below analysts’ expectations of $65.8 billion despite an 11% year-over-year increase. The company’s shares fell by 4% due to this mistake.