Sundar Pichai announces the new milestones of Google One and the upward trajectory of subscription services.
Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that the company's cloud storage service, Google One, is “almost ready to surpass” the 100 million subscribers.
During Alphabet 's Q4 2023 earnings call , Pichai added that the company is looking at adding AI to its Google One service. The search engine first introduced Google One in 2018. Since then, the product has evolved to offer additional perks, such as photo editing features in Google Photos, such as magic eraser, portrait light and blur, color pop, and sky suggestion.
Google One plans start at $1.99 per month, providing 100GB of storage that can be shared with five people and access to the VPN service in the United States.
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Pichai noted that Google’s overall subscription business — including YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV and Google One — is on a growth trajectory, exceeding $15 billion in annual revenue. The company said that’s a fivefold increase from 2019. He also noted that due to strong subscription performance, the “Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices” segment has grown 23% year-over-year.
Google last reported that YouTube paid plans had 80 million subscribers in November 2022. However, there has been no further update since then. The company said that YouTube Shorts is watched by 2 billion monthly logged-in users and records 7 billion daily views – the same numbers it reported in its Q3 2023 results.
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Google recently laid off about 1,000 employees in areas such as materials, engineering and services, as well as 100 employees from YouTube . Later, Pichai sent an internal message to staff saying there would be more job cuts this year.
It's important to note that in Google 's financial results announcement , it reported that it had 182,502 employees, slightly more than the 182,381 reported in its Q3 results. However, the number is significantly lower than the 190,234 employees it had at the end of 2022.
Information source: techcrunch.com
