Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Pinterest fans are nothing if not loyal. Many have spent years—sometimes decades—carefully curating boards filled with wedding inspiration, home decor ideas, fashion, and more. Now users are logging in only to find themselves locked out of their accounts without warning, with all their pins gone. Frustrated users have taken to platforms like X and r/Pinterest to vent. The comment sections on Pinterest’s official Instagram and TikTok pages are flooded with pleas from angry users demanding answers. “I had a beautiful Pinterest board with over 26,000 of the most beautiful images and my account was just permanently banned,” one user posted on X. “Pinterest you will be…

Ann Hummond knew the office software like the back of her hand. Based in Yorkshire, England, she could untangle any spreadsheet snafu in her sleep. Over the past 23 years, she had worked her way up from a data entry clerk to her finance company’s administrative director, quietly becoming the person everyone relied on when things went sideways. She was, in short, indispensable. And then, one Tuesday morning last year, during a quarterly team meeting attended by directors, colleagues, and a team leader, her boss—who is nearly 10 years her senior—told her publicly, in a roomful of people: “You’re too old to do this job.” “I must have looked like a goldfish…

White smoke at the Vatican can only signal one thing: A new pope has been elected. But online? A flurry of memes are roasting the traditions of the Pope’s midwestern roots. Just hours after the conclave concluded, electing Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Provost as pontiff (who will now go by the name Leo XIV), users all over social media are taking part in stereotype-laden antic, associating the Pope with deep pizza, sports, and, of course, Malört. The r/Chicago Reddit thread is flooding with papacy-related memes. In one post, an image of a Catholic priest holding the sacramental bread has been edited to turn the wafer into a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Th…

Companies that endure beyond 15 years understand that innovation is not optional—it’s essential to fend off constant disruption, stay ahead of competitors, and sustain growth. The opportunities are endless, from modernizing entrenched processes to strengthening business continuity. Axon For helping law enforcement coordinate manhunts The proliferation of public cameras, vehicle sensors, and other data sources can greatly aid law enforcement in locating suspects, but only if the information is efficiently collected and analyzed. Axon Fusus provides a unified interface that integrates video feeds, alerts, analytics, and vehicle data from Axon devices, community cameras, …

Chances are, you have an opinion about Palantir. “With any person, company, or concept, the general public really only has space in their head for one characteristic of it,” says Palantir alum Marc Frankel, cofounder, board member, and former CEO of Manifest, which creates software and AI “bill of materials”—think ingredient labels for critical software. “Biden: old. AI: scary. Palantir: secretive.” Frankel worked at Palantir from 2013 to 2018, and whether the one idea in your mind about Palantir is secretive or something else, it likely exists somewhere in this band of public opinion from the past year. Believers: Palantir’s a “category of one” company, accordi…

After raising billions in funding, vertical farming companies have struggled. Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based startup backed by investors including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, filed for bankruptcy in March. Bowery, which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last fall. Another startup, Fifth Season, shuttered its automated indoor farm in 2022. AeroFarms, a pioneer in the space, declared bankruptcy in 2023. The basic business model—growing crops like leafy greens indoors on tall vertical towers—hasn’t proven that it can work. But AeroFarms, which raised an undisclosed amount of money after its bankruptcy and found a new CEO, has managed to turn itself around. The …

Google will confront an existential threat Monday as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into a ruthless monopoly. The drama will unfold in a Washington courtroom during the next three weeks during hearings that will determine how the company should be penalized for operating an illegal monopoly in search. The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a “remedy hearing,” feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple an…

When Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, his family was left not only to grieve but also to navigate how to represent him in court. As they prepared to confront his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, during sentencing, they made an unusual and deeply controversial choice: to have Pelkey appear to speak from beyond the grave. To do so, they turned to technology: An AI-generated video featuring a re-created voice and likeness of Pelkey was presented as a victim impact statement ahead of sentencing. The video showed a digitally resurrected Pelkey appearing to speak directly to the judge. Of course, the statement wasn’t truly Pelkey’s. He couldn…

After a two-year battle with regulators, a federal judge ruled in late December to block the merger of grocery behemoths Kroger and Albertsons. The deal fell apart after facing significant pushback—and a lawsuit—from the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration, in part over concerns that unionized grocery workers would have less leverage to negotiate wage increases and respond to layoffs following a merger. Those concerns were not unfounded: The overwhelming majority of grocery workers (92%) are frontline staff in nonsupervisory positions, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and as industry leaders, Kroger and Albertsons employ 28% o…

For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool. That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as na…

The Soviet Union launched over a dozen probes to Venus—most successfully. But one never made it past Earth’s orbit and has, in fact, stayed there since 1972. Now, over 50 years later, the one-meter-large Kosmos 482 is coming home, albeit a bit haphazardly. The 1,091-pound craft, also known as Kosmos 482 and Venera 8, is predicted to reach reentry within nine hours of 1:54 a.m. ET on May 10, according to the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS). In other words, this could be late afternoon today or sometime tomorrow morning. If you think the when is varied, wait until you hear about the where. Aerospace, the American nonprofit resea…

In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead. Read more How YouTube A…

Israel’s ongoing blockade of humanitarian assistance for Gaza forced a leading aid group to shut its community soup kitchens Thursday as it faced empty warehouses and no replenishment of supplies in the war-battered enclave. World Central Kitchen was serving 133,000 meals per day and baking 80,000 loaves of bread over the past weeks, but said it was forced to suspend operations since there is almost no food left in Gaza for the organization to cook. The lack of food is threatening Gaza’s population, already battered by 19 months of war. In April, the World Food Program said its food stocks in Gaza had run out under Israel’s blockade, ending a main source of susten…

From his first moments on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV gave three important clues about what kind of leader of the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church he will be. Leo, formerly U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected by the world’s cardinals on Thursday as the new pope on the second day of the conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died last month. He is the first pope from the United States, but holds dual citizenship in Peru, where he was a missionary for decades before becoming a cardinal. Leo’s first clue was his choice of name. Popes often use this choice to send their first major signal about the priorities of their new…

Resilience is a much-needed skill in today’s tough job market. Despite the headlines lambasting young employees as “lazy” and “entitled”, a Big Four consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands and offering training for recent grads. PwC will give its new young hires “resilience” training to toughen them up for careers as management consultants. The firm has introduced the initiative in the UK to help Gen Z brush up on their “human skills,” including communication with clients and handling day-to-day work dynamics, like pressure or criticism. “Quite often we are struck that the graduates that join us… don’t always have the resilience; they don’t always h…