Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Apple could owe you part of a class action lawsuit settlement centered around the company’s voice assistant, Siri. The settlement was reached in January, and Apple agreed to set aside $95 million to pay people who allegedly had their conversations or queries recorded after unintentionally activating Siri. Here’s what you need to know about the settlement, key dates, and how to determine whether you can participate in the $95 million payout. What is the settlement about? Back in 2014, Apple added a “Hey, Siri” hotword command that, when spoken, automatically triggers Siri on a compatible Apple device to listen to what is being said. The feature was meant to be u…

December is here, and another year has blown by. Chances are, you’re going to get some time off for the holidays. If so, you may have a week(-ish) to recharge before you have to ramp back up in January. In order to get the most out of your time off, it would be ideal if you could unplug from work completely to give your mind a rest and to focus on family, friends, and yourself. There are a few things you can do to prepare now that will help a lot and will also make your transition back to the office go smoothly. Close as many tasks as possible Research going back almost 100 years finds that when you have a task to complete, you are highly motivated to finish it. It stay…

The The President administration is loosening rules to help U.S. automakers like Elon Musk’s Tesla develop self-driving cars so they can take on Chinese rivals. U.S. companies developing self-driving cars will be allowed exemptions from certain federal safety rules for testing purposes, the Transportation Department said Thursday. The department also said it will streamline crash reporting requirements involving self-driving software that Musk has criticized as onerous and will move toward a single set of national rules for the technology to replace a patchwork of state regulations. “We’re in a race with China to out-innovate, and the stakes couldn’t be higher,” s…

Coca-Cola said Wednesday that its chief operating officer will become its next CEO in the first quarter of 2026. The Atlanta beverage giant said its board elected Henrique Braun as CEO effective March 31. James Quincey, Coke’s current chairman and CEO, will transition to executive chairman of the company. Braun, 57, has worked at Coca-Cola for three decades. Prior to assuming the COO role earlier this year, he led operations in Brazil, Latin America, Greater China and South Korea. He has held positions overseeing Coke’s supply chain, new business development, marketing, innovation, general management and bottling operations. Braun was born in California and raised in B…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. For years, famed restaurateur Danny Meyer has wanted to reinvent the way diners pay their bills. He’s dreamed of a world in which patrons can pay for their meals and simply walk out of an eatery without asking and waiting for the check. Meyer’s vision for frictionless payments found its way t…

The enterprise world is awash in AI optimism. Boardrooms buzz with talk of transformation, and budgets swell to accommodate the latest platforms and AI assistants. Today, nearly three-quarters of companies report using generative AI regularly in a core business activity, according to recent McKinsey & Company research. But if you look past the headlines, a familiar pattern has emerged that reminds me of the dot-com era, when companies rebranded overnight, and investors chased the next big thing, often with little regard for a tangible way forward. Today, talk of an AI bubble isn’t just a matter of market speculation or start-up hype. It’s unfolding inside orga…

For actors, it’s the Golden Globes. Musicians, it’s the Grammys. Now, content creators have their own award to aspire to. Introducing Instagram Rings. As social media’s place in the entertainment ecosystem grows, the new award program from Instagram is meant to honor those creatives “who don’t just participate in culture – but shift it, break through whatever barrier holds them back to realize their ambitions,” according to a blog post about the launch. Judged by a panel of creatives spanning fashion and makeup to sports and entertainment, each nominated their own longlist of favorite creators and voted on which 25 of Instagram’s three billion users will be…

The fintech industry has spent the last decade obsessing over seamless experiences and bringing financial products inside the tools that consumers were already hooked on. Instant approvals, one-click funding, and frictionless onboarding became the benchmarks of success. And for good reason; they removed friction that had frustrated their customers for generations. But here’s what we’re learning as embedded finance matures: The consumers and businesses that use embedded financial products repeatedly and stay loyal to their platforms are not just staying for the technology and platform. They’re staying because when they need it, they’re able to get help from people who und…

As Jennifer Harris, director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has recently pointed out, we are at a particularly fraught moment. Rising inequality means that fewer people have spending power, creating incentives that sharpen the affordability crisis for everybody else. But there are remedies that don’t require draconian taxes and are proven to work—at their core is ownership. Since 1984, worker productivity in the United States has risen by 80%. Real wages have risen by 20%. The stock market, in the same period, has risen by roughly 9,000%. Now comes artificial intelligence—poised, in BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s words, to…

Henry Ford famously noted, “Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right.” His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes. Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so. Perhaps the most influential work comes from Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, defined as people’s beliefs in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to manage prospective situations. Across hundreds of stu…

Despite a weekslong multinational crackdown, scam centers along the Thai-Myanmar border are still operating with up to 100,000 people working there, the top police general leading Thailand’s operations against the fraud compounds told Reuters. Thailand is fronting a regional effort to dismantle scam centers along its borders, which are part of a Southeast Asian network of illegal facilities that generate billions of dollars every year, often using people trafficked there by criminal gangs, according to the United Nations. Based on early assessments of some of the 5,000 people pulled out of sprawling scam hubs in Myanmar’s Myawaddy area, hundreds went there volunta…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on the role of NSFW material on AI platforms, which could be complicated when AI platforms turn into social platforms. I also look at a powerful new Anthropic model for free Claude chatbot users. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. Sam Altman welc…

When the House of Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was demolished in 2017, it was an architectural awakening for the city. A large circular concrete building completed in 1982, the House of Cinema was an instant cultural and architectural landmark in the city, then part of the Soviet Union. Its demolition, to make way for a controversial commercial development project, spurred many in the city to worry about which landmark would fall next. That led the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation to launch a citywide research project to document endangered buildings. Most were built between the late 1960s and early 1980s when the Soviet Union sought to frame its ambi…

Never underestimate the news media’s ability to amplify the mundane with urgent-sounding headlines. If you follow the twists and turns of the retail industry as closely as we news-watchers do, you may have noticed recently that the simple act of closing for the Easter holiday has been rebranded as a “retail blackout.” If you’ve been at all confused by this oversold terminology, here’s a brief explainer to help break it down: What’s happening? Over the last week or so, a number of news organizations—mostly from outside the United States—have reported on a so-called “retail blackout” that is set to take place on Sunday, April 20, which is Easter Sunday. E…

There is a new landmark at the home of the Chicago White Sox—Section 140, Row 19, Seat 2. That’s where Father Bob—the future Pope Leo XIV—sat for Game 1 of the 2005 World Series. The White Sox unveiled a graphic installation Monday that pays tribute to the new pontiff and that moment during their last championship run. The pillar artwork features a waving Pope Leo XIV, along with a picture from the TV broadcast of the future pope sitting with good friend Ed Schmit and his grandson, Eddie. The team also is planning to do something to commemorate the Rate Field seat the pope occupied during the 2005 World Series opener. “When people come into the ballpark, it’s an inter…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. François Chollet on AI benchmarks I wrote an exclusive feature this week about the launch of a new AI benchmark called ARC-AGI-3. The benchmark was created by influential AI researcher Francois Chollet, who also created the widely-used Keras deep learning framework, a simplified toolkit for building AI models. Chollet has long argued that current AI models are limited in their ability to navigate novel situations and problems. The ARC test, which humans can master but not most AI system…

Health and wellness is a product category littered with broken promises and bad pitches. These Brands That Matter honorees have created work for products that aim to uplift, help, and encourage across a wide range of challenges and issues, big and small. Bobbie Many new mothers feel pressured to breastfeed their children but cannot for a variety of reasons. Bobbie has been working to change the narrative around using formula through advocacy and education efforts, while offering an organic product that still meets the FDA’s nutrition requirements. Its “Ask for Help” campaign with Meghan Trainor revealed that 86% of mothers felt frequent or constant negative emotions p…

The U.S. Justice Department is doubling down on its attempt to break up Google by asking a federal judge to force the company to part with some of the technology powering the company’s digital ad network. The proposed dismantling coincides with an ongoing federal effort to separate Google’s Chrome browser from its dominant search engine. The government’s latest proposal was filed late Monday in a Virginia federal court two-and-half weeks after a federal judge ruled that its lucrative digital ad network has been improperly abusing its market power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers. In a 17-page filing, Justice Department lawyers argued tha…

There’s a lot of fear these days in the media world over the “zero-click” future. AI chatbots and search engines ingest content, interpret it, and then summarize it for users, with the inevitable consequence being that people no longer visit your site. This is not theoretical. Data from Chartbeat, an analytics company that serves media sites, shows global publisher traffic from Google dropped by one-third last year, with smaller publications hit hardest. So yes, AI substitutes content, but it doesn’t do so evenly. A recent analysis from Define Media Group looked at how the presence of Google AI Overviews affected traffic to different types of content over the past year. …

On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and softwar…

A commercial airliner was on final approach to San Francisco’s international airport in November when the crew spotted a drone outside the cockpit window. By then it was too late “to take evasive action,” the pilots reported, and the quadcopter passed by their windshield, not 300 feet away. A month earlier, a jetliner was flying at an altitude of 4,000 feet near Miami’s international airport when its pilots reported a “close encounter” with a drone. In August, a drone came within 50 feet of clipping the left wing of a passenger jet as it departed Newark International Airport. The incidents were all classified as “near midair collisions” — any one of which could ha…

“Climate tech” isn’t a thing. It has shifted in recent years from a category to define clean energy companies to an umbrella phrase that loses meaning the more we use it. Granted, the term is everywhere: inserted into VC pitch decks, plastered on billboards along highways from San Francisco to Austin to Boston, wedged into government policy papers, and featured prominently on conference agendas. Media properties from CNBC to GreenBiz rely on it as a traffic-driving category. And there’s a reason why. A changing climate is the most complex and vast challenge and opportunity confronting our society today. That also means we can’t afford ambiguity. We need accountabi…

“Embrace the suck.” One of the first things you learn as a Marine is to “embrace the suck.” Not because it sounds tough—but because it’s how strength is forged. In today’s world, where ease is glorified, we need to remember this truth: real strength comes from struggle. Before I became a leadership coach and positive psychology expert, I was a United States Marine Corps officer. I learned quickly that discomfort isn’t a barrier to success—it’s the path to it. And that truth still guides everything I do. You don’t build strength by avoiding discomfort. You build it by seeking it. We live in a world where ease is glorified—but that pursuit is costing us our …

For decades, huge swaths of Brazil’s Cerrado ecosystem have been used to support the global demand for burgers. Forests and grasslands were replaced by pastures along with farms growing soy to feed cattle. But a major restoration project is now underway on an area nearly twice as large as Manhattan. If you fly over one part of southwestern Brazil, you’ll see a patchwork of dozens of square plots where a local university is studying different methods of helping native plants regrow on former cattle pastures. On more than 25,000 acres, along rivers and the edge of remaining pieces of forest, new vegetation has been growing quickly over the past two years. Wildlife cameras …