Alphabet has just released its financial statements for the first quarter of 2026, and one of the details that seems quite interesting to us is the increase in subscription numbers, which are now reported to be at 350 million at the end of the first quarter of 2026.
This is an increase of 25 million new subscriptions, which according to the financial report, is driven by subscriptions to the YouTube Premium video streaming service and the Google One cloud storage service.
Interestingly, despite the increase in YouTube Premium subscriptions, YouTube's advertising revenue does not seem to have reached Wall Street's target, which wanted the platform to generate $9.99 billion in revenue in the first quarter, although the final figure was slightly off by $9.88 billion.
Alphabet's initial expectation was that this decline in revenue was inversely proportional to the increase in the number of users subscribing to the YouTube Premium service. In Q4 2025, YouTube is seen to have generated $11.4 billion in revenue through advertising.
Meanwhile, subscription figures for Gemini's artificial intelligence service were not reported this time, but if the figures are seen as similar to last quarter, Gemini is seen to have 750 million subscriptions globally, most of which are from enterprise customers, and those who subscribe to Google One cloud storage with the Gemini AI plan.
