During Alphabet's Q4 2023 earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that the Google One cloud storage service is on the verge of surpassing 100 million subscribers. Pichai expressed the company's intent to enhance Google One by introducing more AI-powered features. Launched in 2018, Google One has evolved over the years, offering additional perks such as Google Photos editing features, including a 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 five people and access to the VPN service in the US. Pichai highlighted the positive trajectory of Google's overall subscription business, including YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV, and Google One, which collectively generated over $15 billion in annual revenues, marking a fivefold increase from 2019. The "Subscriptions, Platforms, and Devices" vertical experienced a noteworthy 23 per cent year-on-year growth.

While YouTube's paid plans had 80 million subscribers in November 2022, there has not been a recent update. YouTube Shorts continues to garner significant engagement, with 2 billion signed-in users monthly and 7 billion daily plays, aligning with the figures reported in Google's Q3 2023 results.

Google recently underwent organisational changes, laying off nearly 1,000 employees across hardware, engineering, services, and 100 employees from YouTube. Pichai acknowledged in an internal memo that further job cuts are anticipated in the coming year.

Despite Google reporting 182,502 employees in its latest earnings release, a slight increase from the Q3 figures, it remains notably lower than the 190,234 employees reported at the end of 2022. Google's ad revenue of $65.5 billion fell short of analyst expectations, causing a 4 per cent dip in stock prices, despite an 11 per cent year-on-year increase.