During Alphabet’s Q4 2023 earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the company’s Google One cloud storage service is on the verge of reaching 100 million subscribers. Pichai expressed the company’s intention to enhance Google One by introducing additional AI-powered features. Google One was initially launched in 2018 and has evolved to include extra perks like Google Photos editing features such as magic eraser, portrait light, portrait blur, colour pop, and sky suggestion.
Google One plans start at $1.99 per month, providing 100GB of storage shareable with up to five people and access to the VPN service in the U.S. Pichai highlighted the overall success of Google’s subscription business, which encompasses YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV, and Google One, surpassing $15 billion in annual revenues. This represents a remarkable 5x increase compared to 2019, contributing to a 23% year-on-year growth in the “Subscriptions, Platforms, and Devices” vertical.
While Google last reported YouTube’s paid plans at 80 million in November 2022, there hasn’t been a subsequent update. The company did mention that YouTube Shorts are viewed by 2 billion signed-in users monthly, with 7 billion daily plays, consistent with the figures from Google’s Q3 2023 results.
Earlier this month, Google implemented workforce reductions, affecting nearly 1,000 employees in hardware, engineering, and services, and 100 employees from YouTube. In an internal memo, Pichai indicated that further job cuts are anticipated later in the year. Despite having 182,502 employees according to the latest earnings release, slightly more than Q3’s 182,381, the number remains significantly lower than the 190,234 employees reported at the end of 2022.
Google’s ad revenue of $65.5 billion in Q4 fell short of analyst expectations of $65.8 billion, leading to a 4% dip in the company’s stocks. Despite this, there was an 11% year-on-year increase in ad revenue.
