This achievement has arrived following years of effort to get people to pay for additional storage.
Google One now has over 100 million subscribers, according to company CEO Sundar Pichai, who announced the milestone for the all-in-one subscription service for additional storage for the company’s services.
The premium service involves paying for storage for Gmail, Photos, and Drive users.
Reaching that particular Google One milestone underscores the tech giant’s efforts to encourage its users to pay for premium upgrades to services instead of relying exclusively on its free offerings. This started when unlimited Drive storage for photos was discontinued.
It follows the trend that was started by the company’s YouTube Premium service, which reached its milestone first. That said, though it recently reached 100 million subscribers, it took 9 years to get there. To push users to pay for that service, it offered the removal of ads from the video viewing experience and the addition of features such as high-quality streaming and music. Moreover, it aligned with the company’s crackdown on ad blockers.
Google One was already approaching the 100 million subscriber mark in January.
The company announced that it was nearly at the 100 million subscriber mark in January when it made its fourth-quarter earnings announcement. It worked this in as good news as it sandwiched in some other announcements that weren’t as pleasant, before returning to promising news. It also shared at that time that billions of dollars would be spent on layoffs and that it had plans for the launch of a tiered AI Premium Plan.
The new artificial intelligence plan tier is comparable to what is offered through the Google One Premium plan that costs $100 per year for users in the United States. It also includes 2TB of storage and additional features such as dark web monitoring and VPN. That said, it costs twice the price of the original tier.
This new tier provides subscribers with access to an amped up version of Gemini, the new name for the AI chatbot formerly known as Bard. Moreover, it will soon provide users with access to the generative AI features within some of the company’s other services such as Docs and Gmail.
