Google Drive Picking Up Millions of Users in Short Time

Google Drive, the company’s new cloud storage system that launched on April 24, has picked up a lot of users in a short window of time.

A research note from Trip Chowdhry, managing director of Equity Research at Global Equities Research, reported May 12 that Google Drive signups are off to a “very strong start, with probably about 35 million to 40 million signups in 15 days.”

That’s a lot of people interested in backing up their files and a lot of storage capacity. It certainly helps to have an established brand such as Google holding your files.

Google provides free storage for up to 5GB in Google Drive. Extra storage is priced as follows: 25GB: $2.49/month; 100GB: $4.99/month; 200GB: $9.99/month; 1TB: $49.99/month; 16TB:$799.99/month. Other increments below 16TB are available.

“Google got Google Drive right in the very first attempt,” Chowdhry said. “Syncing is about 20 percent to 30 percent faster than DropBox.”

Google Drive isn’t perfect, however. Its application programming interfaces apparently need some work, Chowdhry said.

“On a scale of 10, developers (Chowdhry talked to 14 of them) give 6 to Google Drive APIs,” Chowdhry said. “Developers are optimistic that Google may fix the Drive API’s shortcomings by Google I/O event, which is happening in the last week of June.”

Chowdhry estimated that Google Drive thus far may have generated at least $4 million in revenues (5% x 35 million x $2.49 = ~$4 million per month, he calculated).

“However, at this time Global Equities Research does not have insights into the pricing,” he wrote. “We think we will get a better sense when we attend Google I/O.”