Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

If my three-decade journey in the corporate world has taught me anything, it’s that in business, as in life, the only certainty is uncertainty. In the past 20 years, periods of upheaval, from pandemics to financial crises to AI hysteria, have restitched the fabric of how we work, travel, and communicate. While this uncertainty can generate tension and turmoil, it also forges the best leaders. I’ve seen bosses and colleagues navigate all types of volatility, where the margin between success and failure can come down to a single action or inaction. So, what distinguishes leaders who can successfully shepherd teams through uncertain times from those who can’t? I beli…

The battle for Warner Brothers Discovery got hotter this week as Paramount launched a hostile bid of $108.4 billion for the company, topping Netflix’s agreement last week to pay nearly $83 billion for the company’s streaming and studio assets. It’s the largest M&A deal of 2025 and rightfully will receive tough scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate price for Warner Brothers Discovery will certainly factor heavily into who wins the fight, especially with investors, and there could be additional bidders and proposals. For sure, an acquisition by Netflix of one of the oldest Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, and its HBO Max streaming service would have…

Many of the office buildings emptied by the pandemic are still sitting vacant. A recent report from Moody’s Analytics found that in the second quarter of 2025 office vacancy rates were still above 20% nationwide, and cities across the country are still trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about it. One startup has an unconventional solution. It wants to fill that empty space with crops. Area 2 Farms is a three-year-old company based in Arlington, Virginia, that’s taking the concept of indoor farming to unusual spaces. Its first farm, in Arlington, grows dozens of varieties of crops in a low-slung brick building tucked between a dog day care and a car repair s…

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 …

Below, Maya Shankar shares five key insights from her new book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Shankar is a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. She served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also appointed as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. What’s the big idea? What if the life upheavals that shake you most could also be your greatest opportunities? Change can feel like loss, but it can also be the start of a stronger, reimagined self. Listen to the audio version o…

It’s sometime after midnight on a Monday morning when Zach unlocks his phone and starts scrolling for something to bet on. He’s 26, tucked into his childhood bed at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He moved back in after a stint in Las Vegas that didn’t go as planned. The NFL is done for the night. The NBA’s late games have wrapped. Mainstream sports are fast asleep. In FanDuel’s live betting tab, he finds a women’s tennis tournament streaming from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Two unranked, unknown teenagers, one boasting a 0–1 career record. Empty arena, no ball boys. Between points, the players jog to the fence to retrieve the ball themselves. He puts mone…

Remember the Flip video recorder? In 2009, it was a sensation—a dead-simple, pocket-size recorder that let ordinary people capture and share moments without lugging around a camcorder or figuring out complicated settings. Cisco acquired Flip’s maker, Pure Digital Technologies, for $590 million in stock. Two years later, Cisco shut Flip down entirely. The Flip wasn’t a failure. It solved a real problem elegantly. But it was what I call a “gateway product”—an innovation that reveals what customers want but that gets supplanted by something that delivers the same outcome more simply, cheaply, or conveniently. In this case, the rise of smartphones made a dedicated device …

Every January, we’re bombarded with resolutions rooted in consumption—buy this, try that, subscribe to something new. For Gen Z, this consumer-first vision of the New Year feels outdated and hollow. Instead, Gen Z is turning to peers for a community-driven “soft start” to the year ahead. Popularized on TikTok, January resets offer a modern alternative to the outdated idea of resolutions. This shift from consumer-driven goals to community-supported resets is especially visible in how Gen Z is approaching health and wellness in 2026. It’s not surprising either. Earlier in 2025, millions of young people took to social media to publicly document their quit journeys us…

House fires burn hotter and spread faster than ever before, leaving families with as little as two minutes to safely escape their homes. Despite that short window to reach safety, families are startlingly unprepared: Only 26% of American families have developed and practiced a home fire escape plan. The disconnect between the urgency of fire safety and actual household preparation points to a fundamental challenge in home safety education. Traditional approaches (pamphlets, static demonstrations, and classroom presentations) often fail to create the lasting behavioral change needed when seconds matter most. At Kidde, our ultimate goal is to help keep everyone safe…

Verizon just announced that its current CEO, Hans Vestberg, is stepping down—and the wireless carrier is pulling another seasoned leader out of retirement to take its helm. In a press release published on October 6, Verizon announced that former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman will be leading the company, effective immediately. In the meantime, Vestberg (who has held the title since 2018) will stay on as a special adviser at the company until October 4, 2026. Schulman has served on Verizon’s board of directors since 2018, and was elected lead independent director in December 2024. “Dan is a seasoned and decisive leader with a unique set of experiences, and a proven re…

In this final chapter of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, the platform migrates from computers and phones to the biggest screen in the house: the living-room TV. It also takes on TikTok with brief videos called Shorts and becomes a major destination for podcasts. And it begins to tackle one of its greatest opportunities—albeit a fraught one—by incorporating AI into the creation process. To succeed, it will have to do this without losing the human element that made YouTube a phenomenon in the first place. Comments have been edited for length and clarity. Read more ‘How YouTube Ate TV’ Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This…

Like many, I’ve never met a chatbot I trust completely. Not only do they have a propensity to hallucinate by making up facts, but you can never be sure what their parent companies do with the information you provide. Most AI companies say they use your data to further train their models, but anonymize it first. However, you just have to take them at their word on this. Still, chatbots can be useful for summarizing and explaining complicated information, such as the kind contained in many bank statements, medical reports, and mortgage contracts. So if you do choose to upload sensitive documents like this, you should take steps to redact as much personal information…

On a sidewalk, an unassuming junction box sits strapped to a fence. Inside, dozens of keychains, stickers, mini figurines, and other novelties wait to be discovered by eagle-eyed passersby or trinket traders who have traveled across the city to exchange their treasure. Trinket trading has taken off on social media in recent weeks. The trend first originated in Philadelphia, where Philly’s Trinket Trove began documenting the contents of a repurposed junction box on TikTok in September of last year. It has since spread nationwide, with communities from New York to San Francisco setting up their own boxes of assorted knick-knacks for anyone to stop by and tra…

In a new bag from Freitag, every part—from the fabric to the zipper, straps, buckles, and the thread that holds everything together—is made from a single material. The product is the latest example of a “monomaterial” design approach that some brands are beginning to use for a simple reason: It means that the products can actually be recycled when they eventually wear out. Right now, a typical backpack or bag has components made from multiple different materials. Dismantling everything at the end of its life is too time-consuming and expensive to be feasible. But using one material makes it essentially as simple as recycling a plastic water bottle. “You can basic…

Across the country, solopreneurship is taking off. People are starting their own, one-person businesses in droves. But when it comes to who is doing all of this solopreneuring (yes, it’s a word), one-woman businesses are gaining more traction. More women are starting their own businesses than ever—whether solo or with employees. According to May 2025 data from small business platform Gusto, in the last five years, there’s been a huge leap in just how many women left their jobs to start their own business. In 2019, just 29% of new businesses were started by women. By 2024, that number was 49%. Moreover, over half (52%) of solopreneurs in the U.S. are now women. S…

When a grizzly bear attacked a group of fourth- and fifth-graders in western Canada in late November 2025, it sparked more than a rescue effort for the 11 people injured—four with severe injuries. Local authorities began trying to find the specific bear that was involved in order to relocate or euthanize it, depending on the results of their assessment. The attack, in Bella Coola, British Columbia, was very unusual bear behavior and sparked an effort to figure out exactly what had happened and why. That meant finding the bear involved—which, based on witness statements, was a mother grizzly with two cubs. Searchers combed the area on foot and by helicopter and tra…

As a woman in the United States, turning 21 means beginning a lifelong journey of getting a pap spear every three years. It’s not a pleasant experience. You’ll lie down with your legs in stirrups, while your doctor inserts a speculum inside your vagina. Then, she or he will take a sample from your cervix with a hard plastic device to figure out if you have any trace of HPV (the human papillomavirus), a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, or cancerous and precancerous cells. Starting today, however, there’s an easier solution. Teal Health, a woman’s health company founded in 2020, has developed a new product that allows you to take a sam…

High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue. The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. No private code or repository data was exposed to unauthorized users. Nevertheless, the metadata that is visible can still reveal a mea…

Capital One is buying Brex in a $5.15 billion stock-and-cash deal that underscores how traditional banks are turning to fintech startups to modernize the way businesses manage money. The acquisition, announced Thursday, would bring the San Francisco–based corporate card and expense management company into the fold of one of the largest U.S. financial institutions. The transaction is expected to close in mid-2026, pending regulatory approval and customary conditions. Brex CEO and cofounder Pedro Franceschi will continue to lead the company as part of Capital One. At first glance, the deal looks like a straightforward expansion into corporate cards. In reality, it i…

Gorin explains Expedia’s three-part AI strategy, from improving travel products to giving employees “superpowers.” View the full article

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, will head to the Pentagon on Tuesday to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about how the military uses the company’s artificial intelligence models. And it’s likely to be a tense meeting, as sources first told Axios. Contract talks between the AI startup and the Department of Defense have gone off course in recent weeks as Anthropic has insisted on some safeguards for how its technology will be used. While the San Francisco-based company is willing to loosen some of its usage restrictions for the Department of Defense, it doesn’t want its models used for at least two specific purposes: spying on Americans or developing autonomous …

Two government agencies are warning Americans about threats from Salmonella outbreaks this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has cautioned about a multi-state outbreak of the potentially deadly bacteria in poultry, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has posted two recall notices about tomatoes that are feared to be tainted with Salmonella. Although the poultry and tomato salmonella outbreaks are not reported to be linked, each should be taken seriously given the threat that Salmonella infections can pose. Here’s what you need to know about the Salmonella outbreak and recalls. CDC announces Salmonella outbreak linked to poult…