Alphabet Reports 350M Paid Subscriptions as YouTube Ad Revenue Misses Expectations

Google has added another 25 million paid subscriptions to its services over the past quarter, according to parent company Alphabet's first-quarter earnings on Wednesday. The company said it now had 350 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from 325 million in Q4 2025, with YouTube and Google One plans driving the recent growth. Its release didn't tout the number of Gemini subscribers as a standalone metric, nor its monthly active users. But access to advanced Gemini features is now bundled in with those Google One plans, which are growing. The lack of solid numbers, however, may suggest that the Gemini chatbot still has somewhere north of 750 million users, as in the prior quarter. Instead, this quarter, Google pointed to the growth of Gemini in the key enterprise market, noting a 40% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid monthly active users. It did not offer a solid number here, either, though. YouTube ad revenue missed Wall Street expectations, even as it continued to grow year over year. As Google pushes ad-free viewing as part of its YouTube Premium plan, the video service has seen a decline in ad dollars that has worried investors. Per CNBC, Wall Street expected Alphabet to bring in $9.99 billion in YouTube ad revenue this quarter, but it pulled in $9.88 billion. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had warned analysts last quarter that it would be important to evaluate YouTube's business going forward based on a combination of ads and subscriptions, because when users switch to a YouTube subscription plan, it will have a negative impact on YouTube ads. Last year, YouTube's annual revenue topped $60 billion across both ads and subscriptions, with Q4 2025 bringing in $11.4 billion in YouTube ads alone. This quarter, the YouTube ads figure was $9.9 billion. That's up 11% year-over-year, the company pointed out, but the miss on expectations could suggest consumers are continuing to move from ad-supported YouTube viewing to ad-free subscriptions through YouTube Premium. We expect to hear more about this on the company's earnings call. Still, Alphabet's stock is up on its overall earnings beat with revenue of $109.9 billion, which included healthy cloud growth. On that front alone, revenue topped $20 billion.