Google added 25 million paid subscriptions to its services during the last quarter, parent company Alphabet announced Wednesday in its first-quarter earnings. The company said it now has 350 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from 325 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, with cloud storage and subscription services YouTube and Google One expected to drive recent growth.
The earnings report didn’t highlight Gemini subscriber numbers or monthly active users. But now access to advanced Gemini features is bundled with a growing number of Google One plans.
The lack of hard numbers may suggest that the Gemini chatbot still has more than 750 million users, which is the same benchmark reported in the previous quarter. Google pointed to Gemini’s growth in key enterprise markets, noting a 40% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid monthly active users. Again, no hard numbers were provided here.
YouTube advertising revenue has lagged Wall Street expectations despite continuing to grow year over year.
As Google pushes for ad-free viewing as part of its YouTube Premium subscription plan, the video service’s advertising revenue has declined, worrying investors. According to CNBC, Wall Street had expected Alphabet to earn $9.99 billion in YouTube advertising revenue this quarter, but the company ended up with $9.88 billion. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned analysts last quarter that investors should evaluate YouTube’s future business based on a combination of advertising and subscriptions. When users switch to a YouTube subscription plan, your advertising revenue will be negatively impacted.
Last year, YouTube’s annual revenue topped $60 billion from both advertising and subscriptions, and in the fourth quarter of 2025, YouTube earned $11.4 billion from advertising alone. YouTube advertising figures for this quarter were $9.9 billion. While this represents an 11% increase from the same quarter last year, the shortfall of analyst expectations suggests that consumers are continuing to shift from ad-supported YouTube viewing through YouTube Premium to ad-free subscriptions. We expect to hear more about this during the company’s earnings call.
Either way, Alphabet’s stock rose after the company beat Wall Street expectations with $109.9 billion in revenue, including healthy cloud growth. Cloud sales alone exceeded $20 billion.
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