Google’s Meet teleconferencing service is now adding about 3 million users per day, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on the company’s first quarter earnings call. That’s up quite a bit from earlier this month — Google had said that more than 2 million new users were were connecting on the service every day as of April 9th. Meet’s significant growth is likely driven by increased usage of the service as schools and workplaces have had to host classes and meetings online while at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Last week, we surpassed a significant milestone,” said Pichai on today’s earnings call. “We are now adding roughly 3 million new users each day and have seen a thirty-fold increase in usage since January. There are now over 100 million daily Meet meeting participants.”
To encourage organizations to use Meet, which is part of Google’s G Suite productivity apps, Google rolled out free access to some advanced features of Meet on March 3rd and said it would be extending free access to those features until September 30th on April 9th. Google is also adding new features to Meet to help it better compete with rivals like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, including a Zoom-like gallery view and background noise cancelation. Meet’s 100 million daily users is lower than Zoom’s 300 million daily users, however.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported earned $6.8 billion in profit on revenue of $41.2 billion for the first fiscal quarter of 2020. Google’s cloud computing division, which includes G Suite, earned $2.8 billion, up 55 percent from the first quarter of 2019.
