Google has announced its fourth quarter (Q4) 2023 earnings call and during the session, company CEO Sundar Pichai shared some details about its cloud storage service, Google One. Pichai said that the Google One cloud storage service is “just about to cross” 100 million subscribers. Google One was launched in 2018.
Pichai also noted that Google’s overall subscription business (which includes YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV, and Google One) is on an upward trajectory and has crossed $15 billion in annual revenues.
As per the company, its subscription business has grown by five times growth compared to 2019. Pichai noted that with the strong subscription performance, the company’s ‘Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices’ vertical registered a 23% growth year-on-year.

Google’s subscription performance in Q3 2024

In 2022, Pichai said that YouTube has 80 million paid subscribers. Since then, the company hasn’t provided the updated number of paid users that access its video streaming platform.

However, the company revealed some details about YouTube Shorts and shared similar numbers that were noted in Google’s Q3 2023 results. The company claimed that 2 billion signed-in users watch YouTube Shorts every month while the videos on the platform receive 7 billion daily plays.

Latest job cuts in Google

Google also laid off nearly 1,000 employees in multiple divisions earlier this month. The affected departments include hardware, engineering and services while 100 employees were laid off from YouTube. Later on, Pichai also shared an internal memo that noted more layoffs are expected throughout this year.
The company also mentioned that it currently has 182,502 employees which is more than the 182,381 employees it reported in the Q3 earnings release. However, the number is much lower than the 190,234 employees the company reported at the end of 2022.