Google Meet grows by 3 million users per day

Google Meet, the business video conferencing tool formerly known as Hangouts Meet, is growing by 3 million users per day. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced this during an oral explanation of Alphabet’s current quarterly figures.

Meet now has a total of more than 100 million daily users, Pichai said in a verbal explanation. Since January, the number of users has grown by about a factor of thirty and now about three million are added every day. In the previous month, that growth figure was still 2 million per day. Zoom, Meet’s competitor, recently announced that it has more than 300 million users.

The video conferencing tool is part of G Suite, which in turn falls under the Google Cloud division. This part of parent company Alphabet grew by 52 percent in the past quarter compared to the first quarter of 2019, generating a turnover of almost $2.8 billion, according to the quarterly figures.

YouTube’s ad revenue also grew significantly, from $3 billion in the first three months a year ago to $4 billion in the previous three months. Alphabet first published revenue figures from Google Cloud and YouTube in February, after the US Securities and Exchange Commission enforced more transparency.

Pichai also indicated that Android users spend significantly more time on their phones, which is partly due to the fact that a lot more apps are downloaded. Compared to February, there were 30 percent more downloads in the Google Play Store in March.

In total, Alphabet’s revenue was $41.1 billion, compared to $36.3 billion in the same period a year ago. Profits grew a lot less rapidly and amounted to 9.27 billion dollars, which was 9.19 billion a year ago. This is partly caused by high costs, such as the 1.1 billion dollars that the experimental Other Bets division spent in the past quarter; those costs were $868 million over the same period in 2019.

In addition, the barely increased profit seems to be a sign that the global advertising market is declining. Pichai indicated that the second quarter will be a difficult one for Alphabet for this reason. The company has hired thousands of employees in recent months and the total workforce now stands at more than 123,000, but the company previously said it will hire fewer people in the coming time and according to CNBC, Google will cut its marketing budget in half.