Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

First came the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Then came the news Snapchat is constructing a paywall around Memories. The company announced last week that it’s capping users free Memories storage at 5GB. Those who have spent the better part of a decade cultivating massive personal archives on the app will now be forced to either export those Memories or sign up for one of Snapchat’s new Memories Storage plans in order to preserve them. The promise of free unlimited storage has been a big part of Snapchat’s identity. For many, it has long served as something of a time capsule, where users could store and revisit old Snaps long after they expired from the ap…

If there’s an AI application in media that has had a rough road, it’s the chatbot. With the runaway success of ChatGPT, the whole idea that chat might be the next big thing in audience experiences took on new value, and several publications dove in, offering portals or widgets that enable readers to explore their content in a new way. I think it’s fair to say none of these have been home runs, but some are more promising than others. Chatbots from Skift, USA Today, and The Texas Tribune have all seen some quiet success in user engagement, and while “chat” likely won’t save the media industry, it may well play an important role. Beyond the wins of improving site search…

The past year saw unprecedented change and turmoil in the labor market, from pandemic-era layoffs to AI fundamentally and tangibly turning the workforce on its head. But it’s in these times of uncertainty and transition that leadership becomes of paramount importance. In 2025, the very nature of leadership itself morphed along with the times, and specific themes resonated with readers in specific ways. And they’re bound to remain very much in the game heading into 2026. Here are some of Fast Company’s most popular leadership stories from the last year. Managing underperformers We live in a world of quiet quitting and more workers rejecting hustle culture and th…

The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her. Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’…

Colleagues are a critical part of what makes your work experience enjoyable and meaningful. You interact with your colleagues and (in the best of cases) create a neighborhood of peers that you can rely on both to push the work forward and to share the joys and tribulations of the workday. That’s why annoying colleagues can be a particular thorn. When you have a peer at work that you don’t want to deal with, it disrupts the flow of your day and diminishes your intrinsic enjoyment of work. So, what can you do to deal with annoying coworkers? A lot of that depends on what is making them annoying. Here are a few possibilities. Missing social norms One thing th…

There is a strange gravitational pull in the AI ecosystem right now. Every founder wants to raise a monster round. A $50 million seed. A $200 million Series A. The kind of fundraise that makes headlines, melts your inbox, and gets your parents to finally understand you have a real job. I’ve raised both kinds of rounds. A $12 million one that looked incredible in TechCrunch. And recently, an intentionally small but oversubscribed pre-seed for my new company, Empromptu.ai, where investors fought for allocation like we were handing out Taylor Swift tickets. Having lived on both sides, here is the truth no one in AI land wants to say out loud: A mega round might be the fa…

I’ve spent much of my career in fintech, but some of the most inspiring innovations I’ve seen came from a town most people have never heard of. In early 2025, Ipava State Bank, a tiny community institution in western Illinois, embedded a small amount of life protection into every eligible checking and savings account. No app to install, no portals, no extra steps—coverage was calculated from balances and capped per account. Six months in, reported results included $3.45 million in protection delivered, 7% deposit growth, 4.8% higher average balances, and a 25% increase in customers reaching maximum coverage levels—at a time when many peers were losing deposits. Th…

Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, still admires Facebook. Not the Facebook of today, but the Facebook circa 2005. When it pretty much just told you someone’s birthday and let you poke ’em. “It would still be a great product!” exclaims Chesky. “We’re not going to be that company [making it], but there’s still a need for it.” But while Chesky doesn’t want to build Facebook 2.0, he is laying the groundwork for Airbnb to become something much closer to a social network. Airbnb’s fall updates launching today are but the first steps in a significant reframe of the experience of using Airbnb—one that is moving it closer to social networking, and another that embeds i…

Ford Motor Co. is recalling more than 200,000 Bronco and Bronco Sport vehicles because an instrument panel can fail, increasing the risk of a crash. Federal auto safety regulators said that the instrument panel may not display at startup, leaving the driver without critical safety information. The recall includes 128,607 Ford Bronco Sports, model years 2025-2026 and 101,002 Ford Broncos, also model years 2025-2026, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said. Ford is not aware of any injuries caused by the instrument panel failure. Owners will be notified by mail beginning Dec. 8 and instructed to take their vehicles to a Ford or Lincoln dealer…

The flight disruptions during the record government shutdown that ended last week inspired a rare act of bipartisanship in Washington on Tuesday, when congressional representatives from both parties introduced legislation that would allow air traffic controllers to get paid during future shutdowns. The bill proposes funding salaries, operating expenses, and other Federal Aviation Administration programs by tapping into a little-used fund with $2.6 billion that was created to reimburse airlines if the government commandeers their planes and they are damaged. The bill’s sponsors, which include four of the top Republicans and Democrats on the House Transportation and Inf…

A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece. Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million. The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work …

Melinda French Gates has been very busy since her divorce and subsequent departure from the Gates Foundation. For example, she launched her own venture, with $12.5 billion to put toward advancing causes she cares about, specifically those related to women and families. She has even gotten involved in politics, endorsing a candidate for the first time ever. French Gates isn’t new to leading an organization, or to leading people. She has spent the past few decades leaving her imprint on what is arguably the most influential charitable organization in the world. Still, I imagine it can all get a little overwhelming at times. The key to managing it all isn’t to work const…

In early 2023, a couple of months after ChatGPT launched and became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, I remember feeling both excited but also a bit overwhelmed by the rapid pace of AI. The barrage of news, product launches, and innovative use cases was relentless. We held an executive meeting at that time and decided to immediately reassign additional teams from other long-planned initiatives to double down on AI. We saw an opportunity to deliver even more value to our customers. My experience is not unique. Across the board, leaders have been aggressively implementing AI to improve productivity, lower costs, and improve communication—but the r…

Last week, I walked into a meeting where AI notetakers outnumbered humans three to one. The irony wasn’t lost on me—I built one of them. As CEO of Fireflies, I’ve helped put AI in millions of meetings. And I believe AI should be in every meeting—because knowledge shouldn’t vanish the moment we hang up. But having the right privacy controls to protect sensitive moments is key to using an AI notetaker. THE PRIVACY-FIRST DECISION FRAMEWORK Before your next meeting, ask yourself three questions: Who controls the data? Every meeting should be captured, but not every recording needs to be shared. Use private meeting settings, control access permissions, and set …

In the months following 2023’s Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, film-industry workers adopted a refrain: “Survive ‘til ‘25” — a meager goal reflecting industry reality. The strikes came shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic ground production to a halt. The dream factory had become a nightmare. The pandemic-inflicted production pause bled workers’ savings, forcing many to seek income outside the industry. Once work restarted, those who wanted to return to work — grips, camera operators, writers, directors, administrative staff, the Teamsters who ferry cast and crew to film set…

The return-to-office debate sees no end in sight. Workers still want flexible work—and drag their feet complying with RTO, it was reported this week. Some workers have suspected such policies have been a way of companies saying: “Don’t like it? Quit.” Turns out, maybe they are. A recent Fortune article, citing a 2024 survey of more than 1,500 U.S. managers, found that a quarter of C-suite executives hoped for some voluntary turnover after introducing an RTO policy. One in five HR leaders went further, admitting their stricter office requirements were designed to push staff out. So when the article started making the rounds on Reddit last week, the general la…

For many stars, writing a children’s book is a fun side project they do to capitalize on their fame. Kate McKinnon—a Saturday Night Live alum who has starred in recent movies like Barbie and The Roses—is certainly famous. But the truth is that she had dreamed of writing a novel for middle schoolers since her mid-twenties, years before she even auditioned for SNL. As a child, McKinnon had loved books about slightly oddball characters, like those found in Roald Dahl books. Her favorite heroine was Pippi Longstocking, whom she played in a kindergarten performance. She loved the character so much that she would show up at school for years in a full-on Pippi costume, compl…

Shares opened mixed in Europe on Tuesday after slipping in Asia as some regional markets wrapped up trading for the year. Crude oil prices edged higher and gold and silver resumed their ascent. U.S. futures were flat. In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi rang out the final session for 2025 in a traditional year-end ceremony. “By realizing a Japanese economy that earns the trust of investors around the world, we will create a virtuous cycle in which global capital flows into Japan,” Takaichi said. The benchmark Nikkei 225 shed 0.4% to 50,339.48, its first year-end close above 50,000. It ended 2025 up nearly 25%. With just two trading days left before the y…

Ransomware doesn’t knock on the front door. It sneaks in quietly, and by the time you notice, the damage is already done. Backups, replication, and cloud storage help recover from ransomware, but when it strikes, these products may not be enough. You copy your data and ensure copies are recoverable when needed. Replication is often viewed as the gold standard of protection. It is fast, efficient, and seems like an easy answer. Two common types of replication are in use today. The first is physical to physical. This is when data is copied from one physical device to another, usually at a remote location. The second is physical to virtual. This is when data is copie…

There’s a common story in the marketing and advertising industry, with many variations. Whenever a member of that industry is at a party or on a plane, inevitably someone will ask what they do for a living. And as soon as they say advertising, that person immediately begins to tell them how good they’d be at working in advertising, how they should make this or that ad campaign better, or why that ad they saw during an NFL game is terrible. This probably doesn’t happen to engineers and doctors. The discipline of advertising, and the process behind it has always been up for debate and question. Well, starting on September 30th, NBC’s new show On Brand with Jimmy Fallon …

AI is part and parcel of many corporate design processes these days, including one company making a product many creatives are familiar with: Dropbox. Its VP of design and research, Shannon Butler, is optimistic about the tech’s integrations into her teams’ work—as long as designers are pragmatic in its integrations. Butler leads a design team that she feels has a bigger impact than filing deliverables on deadline: redefining work through the intersection of creativity, collaboration, and AI. A veteran of Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and LinkedIn, Shannon has spent two decades shaping products that influence how billions connect and create. Shannon Butler In her in…

In a seismic shift for one of television’s marquee events, the Academy Awards will depart ABC and begin streaming on YouTube beginning in 2029, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday. ABC will continue to broadcast the annual ceremony through 2028. That year will mark the 100th Oscars. But starting in 2029, YouTube will retain global rights to streaming the Oscars through 2033. YouTube will effectively be the home to all things Oscars, including red-carpet coverage, the Governors Awards, and the Oscar nominations announcement. “We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the…

When Gabriela Flax left her corporate position managing 40 people to work on her career coaching businesses solo and moved from London to Sydney, the first thing she noticed was the silence. Without the constant movement, office hum, phones, and elevator dings, she says, she could finally bask in the quiet she’d always craved. But, she quickly realized, “Oh, wow, there’s no one around me.” Flax, a career coach and founder of the newsletter Pivot School, says, “I initially named my Substack No One’s in the Kitchen. I’d get off a work call super excited [because I] signed a new client . . . go to my kitchen to make a coffee, and no one’s there . . . just my dog loo…