Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Is a side hustle really the only thing separating you from the life you desire? Listening to some influencers on social media could certainly have you thinking so. Side hustles encompass a range of self-directed entrepreneurial activities undertaken while also working a job. For young people with limited access to capital, they’re the most accessible opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship. Yet, we still know very little about who takes them on and why, and what kind of impact they have on working life in economies like Australia. Our new report, Side Hustles: How Young People Are Redefining Work, presents the first wave of findings from an ongoing three-yea…

Noodles & Company, the fast-casual chain known for serving an array of noodle-based dishes, will shutter up to 21 restaurants. The brand, founded in Denver, Colorado in 1995, has already closed at least nine locations over the past year. In a conference call last week, chief financial officer Michael Hynes said, “We expect to close 13 to 17 company-owned and four franchise restaurants in 2025.” The most recent count is up from a previous estimate of 12 to 15 company-owned closures. Noodles & Company currently has 380 company-owned restaurants and 89 franchised locations in 31 states. According to the brand’s website, the impending closures are due to higher f…

Pantone’s professional color matching kits can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars to upwards of several thousand dollars for pros who work in industries like fashion and interiors. Its newest, though, is a single-fan book with more than 600 spot colors, and it’s priced at just $99. Pantone for beginners. Pantone on Thursday announced its Pantone Capsule: Signature Edition. Housed in a collectible, cylindrical case that wouldn’t look out of place in a Sephora, the guide is a sort of Pantone 101 that come on coated and uncoated paper stock with colors selected from across more than 60 years of Pantone history. “At Pantone, we have spent a lot of time speakin…

Midway while sailing across the Pacific with just his cat named Phoenix, Oliver Widger reflected on why he thinks his many followers—more than a million on TikTok and Instagram—are drawn to his story of quitting his 9-to-5 job and embarking on a journey from Oregon to Hawaii. “The world kind of sucks and, like, I don’t think I’m alone in how I felt with my work,” Widger, 29, told The Associated Press on Wednesday via Zoom. “You can be making $150,000 a year and you still feel like you’re just making ends meet, you know what I mean? And I think people are just tired of that and working really hard for nothing and want a way out.” People are inspired by someone who found …

Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without safeguards and diverse perspectives, girls and women are put at greater risk. The dangers artificial intelligence poses to women and girls are real and happening now, affecting their mental health, safety, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth …

I-P-Go! Shares of Navan, a travel-tech firm based in Silicon Valley, hit the exchanges on Thursday. The company priced its initial public offering at $25 per share, raising roughly $923 million. The $25 per-share price is within the $24–$26 range the company zeroed-in on last week, when it also announced it would sell nearly 37 million shares of common stock. The IPO puts Navan’s valuation at around $9.2 billion. Navan shares will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “NAVN.” Founded in 2015, the company bills itself as “an all-in-one business travel, payments, and expense management platform that makes travel easy for frequent travelers,” helping customers fin…

Every week, another executive asks me: Where do we even start with AI? As we enter 2026, this question drives explosive demand for AI upskilling platforms and AI-powered learning solutions. Yet most enterprise AI training programs fail because they lack a systematic framework that moves the organization from confused to fluent to truly differentiated. Think of it as Maslow’s hierarchy, but for AI capability development. And 2026 is the year to climb that hierarchy. An effective AI upskilling platform must address five levels of organizational capability: foundational literacy, company-specific application, durable skills development, breakthrough innovation, and co-in…

Several years ago, a conversation about credit ratings prompted a friendly argument with an acquaintance. My friend, an idealist who hated seeing how the rich and powerful took advantage of those with lower incomes, argued that credit was a force for exploitation. While I’ve certainly seen exploitative lending practices–I’ve been a financial writer for 15 years, after all–it’s equally clear that credit is necessary for ordinary people to get ahead. Without access to credit, things like home ownership would never be possible for anyone who wasn’t already rich. Of course, my friend’s point also stands. Lending can often be exploitative, leading to cycles of debt and…

A smooth retail experience depends on efficient shipping and hassle-free purchases, two elements that can create significant cost implications for retailers. These honorees in the commerce category are developing infrastructure that can make more efficient use of freight trucks, streamline theft detection, and ease the checkout process in warehouse club environments. Flock Freight For reducing inefficiency in truckloads When it comes to freight trucks, wasted space is wasted money. Flock Freight estimates that the equivalent of one in three trucks runs empty because of inefficient deck-space utilization. The Certified B Corporation has built on its patented Shared Tru…

With more than a decade of experience working as a design and tech analyst, Andrew Hogan is all in on the efficiency and ease that tech brings to our lives. But lately at home with his daughters (ages 4 and 18 months), Hogan is grappling with something unwieldy and undefined: how parents, kids, and technology interact, from smartphones to screen time to AI. “We are so eager to remove friction—avoid it and smooth over the rough spots, especially as parents,” Hogan says. In fall 2024, Hogan began writing a newsletter called Parent.Tech, designed to help him, and other parents, better understand how to navigate the increasingly complex world of tech and consumer pro…

GLP-1 weight loss treatment can be pricey. But employers who cover the treatments could end up saving on employee medical expenses overall. The finding is according to a new analysis of health insurance claims by global professional services firm, Aon, released Wednesday. The report looked at data for more than 50 million commercially insured people in the U.S., including 139,000 taking GLP-1 drugs, from 2022 to 2024. It found that after an initial spike in costs related to weight loss treatment with drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy, costs fell — drastically. Cost growth for the group receiving GLP-1 treatment trended at half the rate of the control group in…

Activist and advocate Tarana Burke has spent 30 years raising awareness of sexual violence and working to eradicate it. Burke, who currently serves as the chief vision officer of the nonprofit organization Me Too Movement, coined the phrase “Me Too” in 2006 as a way show young women of color who had experienced sexual violence that they were not alone. The phrase took off as a hashtag on social media in 2017 in the wake of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other high-profile men. Since then, Burke’s organization has partnered with groups including &Rise, Black Women’s Blueprint, and Callisto to support survivors of sexual violence in more than 80…

In 2011, Patagonia faced the same pressure every retailer faces on Black Friday: maximize sales on the year’s biggest shopping day. Instead, they ran a full-page ad in the New York Times with a stark message: “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The ad detailed the environmental cost of making their bestselling R2 fleece, such as 135 liters of water in the manufacturing process and 20 pounds of carbon dioxide for transporting it to the company’s warehouse. This wasn’t a clever marketing ploy. The ad directly urged customers to think twice before purchasing, to fix existing gear before replacing it, and to buy and sell second-hand. This was a real commitment to the values that had…

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the 2026-27 school year has officially opened. Despite the U.S. government shutdown, the Education Department will continue to process the FAFSA. If you plan to attend college next year, Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, recommends that you fill it out as soon as you can. If it’s your first time applying, here’s what you need to know: How does the FAFSA work? The FAFSA is a free government application that uses students’ and their families’ financial information to determine whether they can get financial aid from the federal gov…

It looks like OpenAI is taking the “new year, new you” approach when it comes to its business strategy. To kick off 2026, the company announced it would soon introduce ads into ChatGPT—which was a bit of a surprise, considering CEO Sam Altman had previously said ads would be a “last resort” as a business model. It’s hard to say how final a resort this is without looking at OpenAI’s balance sheet, but we do know the company is feeling the heat. After Google released Gemini 3 in the fall—which scored well on leaderboards, market share, and plaudits from the AI community—Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI to ensure that ChatGPT is best in class. And as impressive as …

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the global workforce and rapidly expanding the expectations placed on today’s learners. The World Economic Forum predicts that technological advancements like AI, alongside economic and demographic factors, will lead to a net increase of 78 million global jobs this decade. Educational institutions now face a pivotal moment. They must evolve how students learn, how instructors teach, and how technology supports each step of that journey. For decades, the education sector adopted new technologies cautiously. However, the profound impact of AI on the workforce has accelerated interest and experimentation. Our latest research at Cengag…