Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

A viral clip of a woman scrolling on a completely clear phone with no user interface briefly confused—and amused—the internet. But the truth turned out to be far more literal than most expected. Originally posted to TikTok by user CatGPT, the video quickly racked up over 52.9 million views. In the comments, some speculated it was a Nokia model; others guessed it came from the Nickelodeon show Henry Danger. “This looks like a social commentary or a walking art exhibit. I’m too uncultured to understand,” one user commented. “It’s from a Black Mirror episode,” another wrote. Turns out, it was none of the above. Just a piece of plastic. The woman seen in l…

Auckland rang in 2026 with a downtown fireworks display launched from New Zealand’s tallest structure, Sky Tower, making it the first major city to greet the new year at a celebration dampened by rain. South Pacific countries are the first to bid farewell to 2025. Clocks strike midnight in Auckland, a population of 1.7 million, 18 hours before the famous ball drops in New York’s Times Square. The five-minute display involved 3,500 fireworks launched from various floors of the 240-meter (787-foot) Sky Tower. Smaller community events were canceled across New Zealand’s North Island on Wednesday due to forecasts of rain and possible thunderstorms. Australia plans defian…

A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold. The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II. She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belo…

There’s a lot of momentum around women’s sports right now, as ad spending doubled in 2024 and the largest dedicated female sports fund recently announced it has expanded from $150 million to $250 million. While these leaps and bounds are notable, more progress is needed to ensure this isn’t a fleeting moment—but rather the beginning of transformative change. Of course, more money always helps, too. “Women’s sports is skyrocketing and it’s because we are more visible, more than ever, right now,” Stef Strack, founder and CEO of Voice in Sport, said during a panel discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “Investors are looking at women’s sports as a growth oppor…

Psychologist: “Design influences behavior.” Neuroscientist: “Design influences behavior.” Uncivil engineer: “It’s not like my road design influences driver behavior.” Every day, preventable crashes are destroying lives because transportation planners and engineers don’t understand that design influences behavior. (I’m being charitable by assuming they don’t understand.) Drivers respond to the built environment much the same way water responds to a riverbed. The shape, width, and surface conditions of the riverbed determine the water’s speed, turbulence, and direction. Likewise, the width of a road, presence of visual cues, curvature, intersections, and sur…

Like many ambitious tech companies before it, OpenAI introduced itself to the culture at large with big claims about how its technology would improve the world—from boosting productivity to enabling scientific discovery. Even the caveats and warnings were de facto advertisements for the existential potential of artificial intelligence: We had to be careful with this stuff, or it might literally wipe out humanity. Fast-forward to the present day, and OpenAI is still driving culture-wide conversations, but its attention-grabbing offerings aren’t quite so lofty. Its Sora 2 video platform—which makes it easy to generate and share AI-derived fictions—was greeted as a TikTo…

Across the streaming world, companies have been focused on adding features that make their top-tier subscriptions more valuable to the users who consume their content. Anime streamer Crunchyroll recently added access to a library of digital manga for top-paying customers. Spotify—somewhat belatedly—has begun offering high-quality audio for its Premium subscribers. SoundCloud is taking a different approach. It operates a standard streaming platform, with 100 million licensed tracks. But SoundCloud also has an enviable base of creators—musicians, DJs, podcasters, and more—who have uploaded 300 million tracks on the service to reach fans and make money from their stream…

Generative AI has done something strange to the economics of knowledge work: it has dramatically lowered the cost of generating ideas. Any reasonably capable professional with a chatbot can now produce a dozen plausible strategies, memos, product concepts, or marketing plans before lunch. In some cases, AI lowers the cost of execution too—but not nearly as far or as fast. Shipping even one of those ideas still takes weeks, months, or years. The result is already showing up across workplaces: more initiatives than teams can carry, more tools than anyone can learn, and more priorities than any reasonable person can hold in their head. Leaders keep layering on new wo…

It has become clear that women—and working mothers, in particular—are up against all kinds of challenges that threaten their foothold in the labor force. But one trend that may be less evident is that men are also dropping out of the workforce, albeit for different reasons. The jobs report last week offered a more sunny outlook than expected, with an uptick of 115,000 jobs in April; the unemployment rate also held steady at 4.3%. The data also, however, points to a more nuanced story about a broader shift in the labor force. Last month, the number of men who were working or actively looking for a job fell to the lowest figure seen in decades, with the exception of an…

For investors hurtling toward retirement, sitting tight with stocks has been the path of least resistance in recent years. Stocks, especially U.S. names, have soundly outperformed bonds. However, recent events should serve as a wake-up call to take some risk off the table and give bonds a closer look. Stocks have recently encountered some volatility but they’re still near all-time highs. That provides pre-retirees and retirees with an opportune time to scale back equity exposure and plow the proceeds into safer assets like cash and high-quality bonds. The benefits of de-risking The key benefit that bonds confer to a retirement-decumulation portfolio is their lower…

When work was drying up for freelance writer Megan Carnegie, she found herself compulsively hopping between apps and social media. “LinkedIn, WhatsApp, emails—and it was just terrible for my focus,” she says. “I was anxious about getting work.” On a whim, Carnegie (who’s also contributed to Fast Company) popped into a store selling secondhand computer equipment and bought an old Nokia burner phone. During the workday, she would use the burner for calls, and in the evening, switch back to her smartphone. With no access to apps and one fewer way to access the internet, her urgency and anxiety dissolved. “I just loved the quiet,” she says. The effects of social media…

On the first anniversary of the most destructive wildfires in the L.A. area, the scant home construction projects stand out among the still mostly flattened landscapes. Fewer than a dozen homes have been rebuilt in Los Angeles County since Jan. 7, 2025, when the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted, killing 31 people and destroying about 13,000 homes and other residential properties. For those who had insurance, it’s often not enough to cover the costs of construction. Relief organizations are stepping in to help, but progress is slow. Among the exceptions is Ted Koerner, whose Altadena home was reduced to ash and two chimneys. With his insurance payout tied up, the 67-ye…

When we think of summer bags, we tend to think of big totes we can carry to the beach or a farmers market. But this year, bag designers are reimagining the summer staple as a piece of art you can carry around with you. They’re taking the seasonal materials we’re used to seeing—raffia, straw, wicker—and transforming them into beautiful, interesting shapes. They’re meant to do more than hold your phone; they’re designed to give you pleasure and start conversations. Here are our favorite sculptural bags of the season. Camilla Clutch Cult Gaia, $298 Cult Gaia first made a name for itself with a half-moon-shaped bamboo Ark bag, which went viral. Since then,…

Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with writing the first resume in 1482, meaning the resume has been with us for more than five centuries. And though its layout has evolved over the years, the premise hasn’t: a piece of paper that tells someone where you’ve worked, what you studied, and maybe a bullet or two about what you’ve accomplished. That’s the problem. The resume is designed to tell us where someone has been—not what they can actually do. It shows what the last person who hired you needed done in their company that they thought you could handle. It looks backward when the world of work we live in today demands that we look forward. It inflates titles, overval…

Middle managers have had a hard go of it over the past five years. There was the upheaval of the pandemic, followed by ongoing changes in the workplace as companies adjusted to remote work and then, in many cases, eventually brought employees back into the office. Amid all these fluctuations, managers have been tasked with mitigating low morale, parrying employee discontent, and juggling their mounting responsibilities, especially as recurring layoffs thin their ranks. It doesn’t seem like the challenges middle managers are facing will disappear anytime soon, which could lead to high rates of turnover in the very near future. And it’s also not clear whether a new gene…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. What’s in a claim? Sometimes a product can’t be defined by its claim, and that has become a huge problem for the consumer packaged goods industry. Take Dr. Bronner’s and Scrumbles, for example, which both recently announced they’re dropping their B Corp certification for what they perceive to be weakening standards that allow greenwashing. The changing claims landscape What B Lab Global…

We’ve all been there: the windowless conference room, the stale coffee, the flip charts, the obligatory icebreaker, followed by hours of sticky notes and talk of disruption that feels, ironically, deeply uninspired. This is the traditional corporate offsite: a manufactured attempt at connection and creativity staged inside four beige walls. But here’s the truth that most leaders won’t say out loud: If your strategy session could’ve been an email, your offsite isn’t working. In a world demanding fresh thinking, deep alignment, and courageous reinvention, we don’t need more sticky notes; we need more perspective, pause, and place. It’s time to rethink the…