Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced during its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday that it added 25 million paid subscriptions to its services over the past quarter. The company now boasts 350 million paid subscriptions across its offerings, an increase from 325 million in Q4 2025, with YouTube and its cloud storage and subscription service, Google One, primarily driving this recent growth.
The earnings report did not specify the number of Gemini subscribers or its monthly active users. However, access to advanced Gemini features is now bundled with the expanding Google One plans. The absence of solid Gemini user figures might suggest its chatbot still serves over 750 million users, consistent with the benchmark reported in the prior quarter. Google did highlight significant growth for Gemini in the crucial enterprise market, noting a 40% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid monthly active users, though a concrete number was not provided.
YouTube's ad revenue, despite showing year-over-year growth, missed Wall Street expectations. As Google promotes ad-free viewing via its YouTube Premium subscription plan, the video service has experienced a decline in ad revenue, a point of concern for investors. According to CNBC, Wall Street anticipated Alphabet to generate $9.99 billion in YouTube ad revenue this quarter, but it reported $9.88 billion. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had previously advised analysts to evaluate YouTube's business going forward based on a combination of ads and subscriptions, acknowledging that users shifting to a YouTube subscription negatively impacts ad revenue.
Last year, YouTube's annual revenue surpassed $60 billion from both ads and subscriptions, with Q4 2025 alone bringing in $11.4 billion from YouTube ads. This quarter, YouTube's ad figure stood at $9.9 billion. While this represents an 11% increase year-over-year, the shortfall against analyst expectations suggests a continued migration of consumers from ad-supported YouTube viewing to ad-free subscriptions through YouTube Premium.
Despite the YouTube ad revenue situation, Alphabet's stock rose after the company surpassed Wall Street's overall revenue expectations, reporting $109.9 billion in total revenue, which included robust cloud growth, with cloud revenue alone exceeding $20 billion.