Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Friday that the company has registered 100 million subscriptions to Google One, an all-in-one subscription service that increases storage for free services such as Gmail, Drive and Photos, as well as access to more features.
Reaching this milestone underscores the company’s efforts to move people away from free plans, such as ending unlimited photo storage on Google Drive. It took Google’s YouTube Premium service nine years to reach that mark, but it also recently reached 100 million subscribers thanks to the removal of ads and additional features like music or streaming (and at the same time as YouTube made changes to combat ad blockers).
The company said it was approaching the 100 million mark when it released its fourth-quarter earnings last month and disclosed billions spent on layoffs, and it said so again last week when it launched a premium AI plan.
The new AI plan is similar to Google’s existing $100/year One Premium plan, which includes 2 TB of storage and other features such as VPN and dark web monitoring, but costs twice as much. It provides users with access to an improved version of Gemini, the new name for Bard’s chatbot, and will soon add access to generative AI features in services such as Gmail and Docs.
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