Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

With Memorial Day behind us, America’s summer travel season is now in full swing. While flyers should be aware of how to find great fares and the best apps to use when taking a vacation overseas, they should also be mindful of a few new rule changes going into effect at popular airlines, which could impact their trips. Those changes are happening at two of America’s most well-known airlines—Southwest and United—and include alterations to the airlines’ free baggage and check-in policies, respectively. Here’s what to know about the changes and when they go into effect. Southwest’s signature “Bags Fly Free” policy changes on May 28 On Wednesday, May 28, Southwest’…

European Union privacy watchdogs fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video-sharing app’s data transfers to China breached strict data privacy rules in the EU. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was being sent and it ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months. The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin. “TikTok failed to verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of…

One of the most popular smartphone apps in the world has finally come to the iPad. Today, Meta has officially released WhatsApp for iPad. The release comes nearly sixteen years after WhatsApp debuted on the iPhone, and went on to become the de facto messaging app for most of the world. WhatsApp comes to the iPad WhatsApp debuted on the iPhone in 2009, and within just five years, that messaging app had become so popular that Facebook (now Meta) announced in 2014 that it was acquiring it for a staggering $19 billion. But the extraordinary sum Meta paid for WhatsApp seems to have been worth it. On Meta’s financial conference call on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg annou…

Until recently, Peter Attia was best known as a wellness influencer and a newly appointed contributor at CBS. He hosts a popular podcast, boasts more than 1.6 million Instagram followers, and wrote a best-selling book about longevity. That image cracked this week when it was revealed that Attia’s name appears more than 1,700 times in the latest Epstein files release. As the emails circulated on social media, longtime followers of his methods, along with medical professionals, reacted with outrage. “Peter Attia being Epstein’s concierge doctor is by far the weirdest crossover,” one X user wrote. Another one X user quipped: “Peter Attia’s stress level right now…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. When the software engineer and entrepreneur Deon Nicholas was CEO of Forethought, a customer service automation platform, he had an executive assistant to manage the minutiae of his workday. Not surprisingly, he appreciated the help. “That was something that I found was critical, something that actually helped me as a leader,” he explains. Few of us who aren’t in the executive suite have the luxury of calling on another person to wrangle our schedule, triage email, and otherwise keep the chaos of our professional and personal lives under control. As Nicholas contemplated the frenzy of excitement over AI agents…

Since the tragic news broke that director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, have died, tributes have been pouring in. And amid the stories of kindness, compassion, and political action, one story stands out: How the couple’s chance first meeting altered the ending of the 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally—possibly the most beloved romantic comedy of all time. Had the couple not met during filming, the movie’s memorable New Year’s Eve ending might’ve not been a part of the film at all. During production of the iconic rom-com in New York City, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (then Michele Singer) stopped by the set. According to a 1989 New York…

The cutting edge of zipper technology involves zippers that work remotely. Japanese zipper maker YKK says it has developed a prototype for a self-propelled zipper that zips up with just the push of a button. These self-propelled zippers aren’t meant for your jeans or jackets, but rather for industrial uses, like tall tents that can’t be zipped up without using a ladder. That’s the mostly likely place you’ve seen YKK’s logo (it has 40% global market share). The company says the tech will save time and be safer than putting workers high up in the air to zip and unzip in hard-to-reach use cases. YKK conducted experiments with the zippers in February. It says th…

When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses. The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. military’s use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover. Fifty years later, Vietnam’s degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecolog…

Though I long resisted the label, I have been a solopreneur ever since I started working as a freelance writer in 2010. As the owner, manager, and only employee, all decisions about my solo freelancing business are up to me—which continues to feel simultaneously invigorating and terrifying. But not all daunting solopreneurship decisions are the same. While taking creative risks and pitching big names continue to cause some minor fingernail-chewing even after all these years, investing in my business is the leading cause of second-guessing (and third-guessing, fourth-guessing) my own abilities as an entrepreneur. Many other solopreneurs share my lack of confidence …

“Well, it took a minute,” said Spike Lee, surveying the glittering Met Gala crowd during cocktail hour through bright orange glasses that matched his New York Knicks cap. “But we’re here now, that’s the most important thing.” Lee was referring to the fact that for the very first time, the Met Gala was making a point of celebrating Black style and Black designers — something he felt was an overdue milestone, but a very welcome one. “Long overdue,” Lee repeated. “But we’re here to celebrate. And who knows what’s gonna happen because of this event? There’s gonna be reverberations around the world.” Lee was echoing an excitement that many of the approximately 400 guests — …

Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. In a remarkably influential 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen declared that software was “eating the world.” From entertainment to commerce to transportation, he argued, startups that were about code at their core were disrupting many of the world’s most deeply entrenched businesses. That was just the beginning, he warned: “Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.“ Fifteen years later, we know that some of the disruptors Andreessen cited—such as Zynga, Groupon, and Skype (RIP)—did …

Most people still measure performance in hours. They pack their calendars as full as possible, track time down to the minute, and take pride in squeezing more into each day. However, the best performance comes from harnessing rhythm—the alignment of energy, capacity, and focus. It’s what turns effort into flow. In the industrial age, managing time made sense: productivity was tethered to factory shifts and desk schedules. But in today’s BANI—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible—world, hours spent no longer translate neatly into value created. The leaders who thrive now are those who sense and harness the rhythms of their team. Energy rises and falls acros…

OpenAI never wanted to build a chatbot. As an early beta tester for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, I can vouch for the fact that the company was caught totally off guard by ChatGPT’s runaway success. An email that OpenAI sent me on November 28, 2022—just two days before ChatGPT came to market and kicked off a trillion-dollar, multiyear, economy-distending AI scramble—didn’t even mention the new interface. Rather, it bragged about the company’s then-revolutionary “DaVinci” model and how it could “deliver clearer, more engaging, and more compelling content” and allow developers to “take on tasks that would have previously been too difficult to achieve.” From th…

Ikea’s new store is in the metaverse. The company announced Wednesday it’s piloting a limited-edition pop-up in Roblox’s “Welcome to Bloxburg” game offering players Ikea products they can use to decorate virtual homes. This is the first time that the Swedish furniture retailer has entered gaming in a meaningful way, since an earlier Roblox game in 2024, according to the company. It comes after noticing for years how young adults and teens were building and designing homes in games and wondering why Ikea wasn’t a part of it. “Ikea wanted to better understand how Gen Z and Gen Alpha think about furnishing and self-expression, recognizing the need to meet them on…

After years of struggling with the complexities of a merger that saw the combination of two major discount retailers a decade ago, Dollar Tree has decided to cut ties with Family Dollar. The company has announced an agreement to divest its Family Dollar business to private equity firms Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management for $1 billion, a strategic move that aims to streamline operations and enhance focus on its core Dollar Tree segment. Following the announcement, Dollar Tree’s shares surged nearly 7% in premarket trading on Wednesday. The deal is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to improve performance, with CEO Rick Dreiling emp…

Bringing a new drug to market usually requires a decade-long, multibillion-dollar journey, with a high failure rate in the clinical trial phase. Nvidia’s Kimberly Powell is at the center of a major industry effort to apply AI to the challenge. “If you look at the history of drug discovery, we’ve been kind of circling around the same targets for a long time, and we’ve largely exhausted the drugs for those targets,” she says. A “target” is a biological molecule, often a protein, that’s causing a disease. But human biology is extraordinarily complex, and many diseases are likely caused by multiple targets. “That’s why cancer is so hard,” says Powell. “Because it’s many …

Starting today, Google is weaving its massive investment in AI into one product nearly everyone already uses—and for many people, the change won’t feel optional. Google announced Thursday that a suite of new features powered by Gemini 3 will begin appearing in Gmail, introducing automation designed to reduce inbox overload. The most consequential update is a new Gmail view called AI Inbox, which reshapes email around summaries, topics, and to-dos, rather than individual messages. What changes the moment this turns on For users, the shift isn’t about learning new tools—it’s about no longer having to manage email the same way. Instead of opening Gmail to a chrono…

For many people, the first time they thought about Kalshi—a prediction market where you can place bets on the outcomes of sports, politics, culture, weather, and much more—was after a video clip of its cofounder, Tarek Mansour, went viral last week. Speaking on stage at the Citadel Securities Future of Global Markets Conference, the moderator Molly O’Shea asked, “Tarek, you’ve mentioned multiple times that you think prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. What is it going to take to become a $1 trillion asset class?” In response, Mansour said, “You know, ‘Kalshi’ is ‘everything’ in Arabic. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create…

Many brands take advantage of Mother’s Day to sell more products, like flowers and cupcakes. But 50 companies, including workwear label M.M. LaFleur, framing startup Framebridge, and stroller brand Bugaboo, are joining forces to draw attention to America’s lack of federal paid leave. Across the country on Saturday, May 10, the nonprofit MomsRising, the Paid Leave for All campaign, and 50 brands are hosting pop-ups in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Nashville; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Cleveland, offering more than $100,000 in donated goods and services. The idea is to help new moms by giving them things like formula, breast pumps, clothing, and strollers…

Feeling like you’ve overdone it on the scrolling? Now you can take a break from TikTok to meditate, without ever leaving the app. TikTok’s new in-app meditation feature, announced Thursday, was first tested earlier this year with a group of teen users and is now rolling out to everyone. Designed to improve sleep quality, the meditations activate during designated “sleep hours” and serve as a gentle nudge to put the phone down during a late-night scroll session. For users under 18, the feature is enabled by default. If teens are still on the app after 10 p.m., their For You feed will be interrupted by calming music and breathing exercises. If ignored, the prompt re…

If you’re in need of some good and satisfying news, Chipotle has got you covered. The beloved burrito brand is bringing back its free burrito promotion for April 3rd’s National Burrito Day. According to the chain’s March 31 announcement, Chipotle Rewards members will once again be able to play the popular Burrito Vault game at UnlockBurritoDay.com. The game, which involves customers trying to guess exact burrito order combinations, is easy to play but comes with delicious prizes. Players will get four attempts to win BOGO (buy-one-get-one) codes. Each hour, the first 2,500 members to choose burrito orders with the correct ingredients will win free food. “Las…