Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Digital banking fintech firm Chime disclosed a rise in 2024 revenue in its IPO filing on Tuesday for a long-awaited U.S. stock market launch. Financial technology companies have increasingly entered the U.S. lending space, aiming to wrest market share from major players such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. Chime’s revenue rose to $1.67 billion in the fiscal year ended 2024, up from $1.28 billion, a year earlier. The IPO window has reopened as markets recover sharply amid progress in trade talks, offering companies an opportunity to list their shares after months of turbulence driven by tariffs. A strong debut by Chime could pave the way f…

Igas, Charles, Corey, and Ryan are four characters in a popular TikTok skit series where, over Zoom, they discuss how to “proactively realign” their “cross-functional synergy” and ensure “tighter execution” in the face of looming threats like a “shrinking opportunity aperture”—otherwise known as February coming to a close. The spoofs, posted by startup recruitment firm Verso Jobs, are intentionally drenched in nonsense. All the characters are played by one employee, Seamus Harvey, wearing various face filters and cramming in as much corporate jargon as possible. They resonate because they feel real—particularly for Gen Zers and mid-career millennials complaining o…

The home of the “Mona Lisa” is getting a new boss. Art historian Christophe Leribault, a veteran museum director, is taking over at the Louvre, shouldering the challenge of getting the world’s largest museum out of crisis after the brazen heist in October of the French crown jewels. French government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon announced Wednesday that Leribault is taking over from outgoing Louvre director Laurence des Cars, who resigned Tuesday. The difficulties he inherits are formidable. The daylight robbery — among the highest-profile museum thefts in living memory — exposed alarming security holes at the Paris landmark. The former royal palace has also s…

Throughout Kim Kardashian’s two-decade career in the public eye, the reality TV star’s entrepreneurial endeavors have included shapewear clothing brand Skims, makeup brand KKW Beauty, cofounding a private equity firm, and a super popular mobile game. But with her latest venture, Kardashian is stretching her mogul credentials into beverages, which has been familiar terrain for celebrities. She has become a “cofounder” of the energy drink company called Update. Though the startup has existed for four years—meaning Kardashian wasn’t a day-one founder—Update’s CEO and cofounder Daniel Solomons tells Fast Company that she has been a steady customer since 2023 and two years…

Since first appearing on the Masters of Scale podcast at the height of the Ozempic-Wegovy-Zepbound boom, Zach Reitano, CEO of Ro, has helped scale his company into a leading provider of branded GLP-1s—grabbing headlines with a 2026 Super Bowl ad featuring tennis champion Serena Williams and landing a major partnership with Novo Nordisk for the pill version of Wegovy. Now Reitano has new challenges to address: the long-term health unknowns of the medications, the cultural backlash to “Ozempic face,” and what this wave of disruption could mean not just for pharma but for the future of healthcare. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted b…

In late April, indoor golf and entertainment brand Five Iron Golf launched its first location in Saudi Arabia after nearly three years of coordination with Golf Saudi, an affiliate of the country’s massive sovereign wealth fund. The golf center, located on the ground floor of the Public Investment Fund Tower—the fund’s headquarters and the tallest building in Riyadh—offers a similar mix of simulators, leagues and lessons, and food and music as other Five Iron locations both in the U.S. and abroad, says Jared Solomon, cofounder and CEO of the brand. “People are hitting golf balls, they’re having fun, they’re eating food,” he says. “They’re not drinking, because the…

In 2023, Ken Lux found himself in an FBI briefing on child trafficking. The CEO of Luxe Aviation was there as the past commander of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Air Squadron, a volunteer cadre of 50 general aviation pilots supporting police missions and community service. Lux recalls the FBI agent relaying the story of a since-jailed airline pilot who used his credentials to traffic children to clients in the Philippines with chilling negotiations. “I have a girl that’s 12 years old for your client,’” the pilot said. The client’s response: “No, we think we need an 8-year-old.” The group was horrified. “I have two daughters,” Lux says. “We said, ‘Wa…

What should you do if you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep? This is one of the most common—and frustrating—forms of insomnia. It turns out there’s a biological reason for it. And there are things you can do that may help you drop off again quickly. If you’re an entrepreneur or business leader, this may have happened to you more than once. Starting a business and being responsible for a team of employees means you may have a lot to worry about. In the middle of the night, those worries seem to grow more powerful and harder to set aside or ignore. You find yourself stuck going round and round in an endless cycle of negativity. Pretty soon, it’s…

Those AI tools are being trained on our trade secrets. We’ll lose all of our customers if they find out our teams use AI. Our employees will no longer be able to think critically because of the brain rot caused by overreliance on AI. These are not irrational fears. As AI continues to dominate the headlines, questions about data privacy and security, intellectual property, and work quality are legitimate and important. So, what do we do now? The temptation to just say “No” is strong. It feels straightforward and safe. However, this “safe” route is actually the riskiest of all. An outright ban on AI is a losing strategy that creates more problems than it solves. It fost…

A reader asks: Two years ago, I began managing Craig, who had been doing the same tasks day in and day out for a decade. He hadn’t adapted to new technology, best practices, or industry trends. My first order of business was to coach him and challenge him to grow and learn. For more than a year, we built up a great trajectory. People saw how much his work improved and commented on it frequently, and said he seemed revitalized in many ways. His progress gave me a lot of hope that he could become good at the modern demands of his role. Then about six months ago, Craig suddenly reverted to his old patterns. It was as if the prior year of progress got completely wiped out. …

Charlie Javice, the founder of a startup company that promised to revolutionize the way college students apply for financial aid, was sentenced Monday to more than seven years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million by greatly exaggerating how many students it served. Javice, 33, was convicted in March of duping the banking giant when it bought her company, called Frank, in the summer of 2021. She made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. Addressing the court before she was sentenced, Javice, who was in her mid-20s when she founded the company, said she was “haunted that my failure has …

“Mad Max mode” may sound like something out of a video game, but it is a real-life setting for cars currently plying America’s streets. And it poses genuine danger. In an homage to the main character from George Miller’s dystopian 1979 film and its sequels, originally portrayed by current The President supporter Mel Gibson, Tesla created Mad Max mode as an option for vehicles equipped with its “Full-Self Driving” (FSD) system. The Mad Max icon is a mustachioed smiley face wearing a cowboy hat, bearing less of a resemblance to the film’s titular vigilante than to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal. (Warner Bros., which released the films, has not filed suit.) De…

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. Twenty twenty-six will be a year of financial corrections, AI-driven biological breakthroughs, and new thinking about cybersecurity and executive protection—at least according to the CEOs I recently asked to provide bold prognostications. Here’s how 12 of them responded. New threats, new prot…

More children are cashing in their Make-A-Wish requests to meet their favorite content creators, with creator wishes more than doubling in the past decade. Make-A-Wish Foundation has been granting life-changing wishes for children with a critical illness since 1980. Now, alongside A-Listers and sports stars, YouTubers and TikTokers are also flooding requests, Axios reported. Requests to meet content creators make up 32% of the wishes granted within the entertainment industry, per Axios, the second largest source of requests behind the music industry. Several of the creators say they’ve been granting wishes for years and more than 50 creators and influencers …

In the rolling hills near Reno, Nevada, in a field filled with solar panels, something unexpected is nestled into the landscape: a data center that isn’t blowing up its neighbors’ electric bills. In fact, the modular data center, built by Crusoe, essentially doesn’t rely on the electric grid at all. It runs on solar power and an unlikely source: hundreds of second-life EV batteries. At a time when data centers are driving up electricity demand—and facing intense political pushback over potential impacts on energy bills and the environment—the batteries offer a flexible way to add power without leaning harder on the grid. The astonishing setup is the handiwork of $6 bi…

Meta is rolling out a new Facebook feature that the company says will help users share more photos—but which could also be used to help train its AI. The opt-in feature allows Facebook’s AI to access your phone’s camera roll in order to find photos it finds “shareworthy,” and to suggest edits using its AI tools. Users can then decide if they want to share the images or not. “With your permission and the help of AI, our new feature enables Facebook to automatically surface hidden gems – those memorable moments that get lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps – and edit them to save or share,” Meta said in its announcement explaining the new feature on Friday…

AI is no longer just a cascade of algorithms trained on massive amounts of data. It has become a physical and infrastructural phenomenon, one whose future will be determined not by breakthroughs in benchmarks, but by the hard realities of power, geography, regulation, and the very nature of intelligence. Businesses that fail to see this will be blindsided. Data centers were once the sterile backrooms of the internet: important, but invisible. Today, they are the beating heart of generative AI, the physical engines that make large language models (LLMs) possible. But what if these engines, and the models they power, are hitting limitations that can’t be solved with mo…

Palantir is undoubtedly controversial. Many view the data and software company as a beacon of technological progress, with some even sporting a photo the company’s CEO on their t-shirts. Others see it as the pinnacle of all modern evil, primarily due to its involvement with the U.S. military and the The President administration’s anti-immigration initiatives. Now thanks to a viral social media post, the debate is once again in the spotlight. On Sunday, Palantir’s X account posted a lengthy summarization of the key points argued in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a book published last year by Palantir CEO Alex K…

A startup called Adapt is betting that it can be an AI hub connecting other software tools to help answer questions and get things done. When users pose questions or ask for help with a business task, Adapt can answer based on information from the web and business data to which it’s been given access, similar to other AI tools. But it can also automatically launch a virtual machine, essentially a computer in the cloud from which it can connect to a wide range of internet-based software, pull information from databases, and craft custom code to analyze data and create charts and visualizations. It’s an approach that cofounder and CEO Jim Benton says lets users with mi…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active housing inventory for sale at the end of March 2025 was still 20% below pre-pandemic March 2019 levels, on a year-over-year basis national active listings are up 29% between March 2024 and March 2025. This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. One of the biggest year-over-year increases is happening in California—where active inventory for sale is up 50% year-over-year. Despite the 50% year-over-year jump in active California housing inventory for sale—in…

Uber is facing internal staff unrest as it attempts to implement a three-day-per-week return to office (RTO) mandate and stricter sabbatical eligibility. An all-hands meeting late last month descended into acrimony as staff flooded the online meeting chat with queries about why the mandate was being enacted. “How is five years of service not a tenured employee? Especially when burnout is rampant in the org,” read one message that was reviewed by CNBC. Following the meeting, Nikki Krishnamurthy, Uber’s chief people officer, issued a memo saying staff had “crossed an acceptable line” during the call. It’s unclear if there has been any disciplinary action to date. …

Grab your boots and cowboy hats. The 60th Academy of Country Music Awards will have you two-stepping in your living room tonight (Thursday, May 8). This big anniversary show is sure to be an old-fashioned good time. Here’s everything you need to know about this celebration of country music, including how to tune in. A brief history of the Academy of Country Music and the ACM Awards Believe it or not, the Academy was founded in Los Angeles, California: A group of country music lovers led by Tommy Wiggins, Eddie Miller, and Mickey and Chris Christensen founded the organization in 1964. Their goal was to promote country music and artists, such as Merle Haggard, …