Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

AllBirds Inc. was valued at $4 billion less than five years ago. Now, it will be sold for just $39 million. The shoe company on Monday announced a definitive agreement with American Exchange Group (AXNY), which involves selling all of its intellectual property, assets, and liabilities. Privately held AXNY owns a number of brands, including Aerosoles, Ed Hardy, and Jonathan Adler. “We are incredibly thankful to our teams for the work they have been doing to fuel our product engine, build awareness of Allbirds and deliver an engaging customer experience,” Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio said in a statement. The sale has already been approved by Allbirds’ boar…

A woman is facing backlash after allegedly calling ICE on construction workers who were finishing up a roofing job at her home in Cambridge, Maryland. In a video, recorded and livestreamed on Facebook by Bryan Polanco, a co-worker with permanent residency, from the roof of the property, federal agents can be seen waiting on the lawn for the workers. X account @LongTimeHistory, which posted a clip from the video, alleges the woman owed the workers $10,000. In the video, which now has millions of views, Polanco says: “We came to fix this lady’s house, and she’s the one who turned us in. Fixing up her house and still with hatred in her heart.” Polanco repeated this …

Every time you ask ChatGPT to draft an email, or prompt an AI assistant to help you decide which refrigerator to buy—somewhere, a data center hums to life to make it happen. These facilities, which can span the size of a small city, are the unglamorous physical infrastructure behind the AI revolution. They’re cavernous buildings packed with servers, cooled by industrial systems, drawing power at a scale that strains local electrical grids. What almost no one talks about is the human beings building them. To construct a single data center, developers source millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, lithium, and critical metals from supply chains that stretch across …

Antonio Bustamante has kept a watercolor of labor leader César Chavez for more than 35 years, hanging it on the wall of his law office in Yuma, Arizona. As a young man, he was moved by Chavez and helped organize workers before joining his security team. Like many others, Bustamante must now wrestle with reconciling the man he adored with the allegations Chavez groomed and sexually abused women and young girls. “I’m trying to figure out how emotionally and intellectually I’ll be able to understand my perception of him as an extremely good man,” Bustamante said, his voice heavy with emotion, “compared to these things that are said he did.” Chavez built a national reputat…

Another round of layoffs has hit the tech industry, this time at SaaS giant Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL). The job cuts reportedly came out of the blue for most affected employees, with many receiving an early-morning email announcing their job loss just hours before they were scheduled to go into the office. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On early Tuesday morning, Oracle employees around the world began reporting on social media that they had received an email from the company informing them that their employment had been terminated. According to these reports, the emails began arriving in employees’ inboxes at around 6 a.m. local …

There’s trouble in AI-generated paradise. TikTok’s most popular AI-generated series “Fruit Love Island” has millions of followers, but that may not be enough to save it from video takedowns and shifting online attitudes toward AI. “Fruit Love Island” is exactly what the title implies: a one-to-one recreation of the popular dating show Love Island, rendered with AI and featuring humanoid fruit as contestants. When hot new bombshells enter this villa, they’re anthropomorphic cherries, bananas, pineapples, and more. “Welcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight, and trust—things get messy fast,” begins the first episode. …

A new investigation from Sen. Ed Markey has zeroed in on the human staffers who operate behind-the-scenes at self-driving car companies like Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox. While many of these companies emphasize that they seek to automate most aspects of driving, they still depend on humans to assist these cars when their software encounters confusing situations—or fails. The investigation began at the beginning of February and was led by Markey, who has taken a particular interest in the self-driving car industry. The study involved sending letters to seven companies working on autonomous vehicles—Aurora, May Mobility, Motional, Nuro, Tesla, Waymo, and Zoox—and asking them…

School is out for Rec Room: The social gaming platform announced on Monday it is shutting down this June, despite “reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way” since its founding in 2016. “Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business,” the company said in a statement. “Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in. “We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work.” “But with the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming, the path to profitability has gotten tough enough that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut thin…

Novo Nordisk just launched a new subscription program for Wegovy customers. In an announcement Tuesday, the Danish GLP-1 maker said the new program will help “reduce cost uncertainty” so that people can maintain access to their obesity drugs. Wegovy contains semaglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist used for chronic weight management. Novo Nordisk also promised savings of up to $600 per year for the pill form of the drug and up to $1,200 per year for the injections with a 12-month subscription. Eligible patients can choose the self-pay options that work best for them. A three-month plan will cost users $329 per month. A six-month plan is $299 per m…

Furniture is one of the biggest hurdles during a move, because good dressers and couches are bulky and expensive. During a stressful time, it makes sense to crave something cheap delivered straight to your door. That’s where fast furniture comes in. These are simple pieces made with a mishmash of plastics, fiberboard and chipboard that aren’t built to last. They can typically be ordered online, are mass-produced and ship unassembled in a flat-packed box. They get the job done, but once thrown out, their ingredients generally can’t be recycled and don’t break down well. “It’s of little emotional value, it’s fleeting, and it is not going to accompany you thr…

It’s been an outrageously long wait, but Google will finally allow Gmail users to change their email addresses. Late last year, a support page in Hindi hinted that changes to Google’s account name policy were on the way, but now it’s official. The company posted the news to X, but noted that only U.S. users will be offered the new flexibility for now. To make the change, head to your email settings options and click “change Google Account email.” Your email history and saved data will remain tied to the account, so don’t worry about losing anything. Users can change their Google account names across products like Gmail, Photos, and Drive, but really, email is the…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, rapid home price appreciation supercharged fix-and-flip activity. The 2022 mortgage rate shock ended that run and caused the biggest pullback in home flipping activity since 2007. Profit margins compressed, days on market increased, and many newer investors exited the space. However, over the past couple of years, home flipping activity has stabilized around 2019 levels. The first LendingOne–ResiClub Fix-and-Flip Survey in Q1 2025 showed a market recalibrating to that new reality. The latest results tell a simi…

Bitcoin has been the king of cryptocurrencies since its inception. And despite its high volatility, the token generally benefits from faith among investors that its underlying encryption is sound—which in turn protects digital coins from being stolen from wallets. But a recent report from Google suggests that Bitcoin’s relative security could soon be compromised by quantum computers, prompting investors to shift their attention to “quantum-resistant” tokens. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Google published a blog post warning that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies may be vulnerable to quantum computers sooner than previously ex…

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has opinions of its own, and it’s not afraid to share them. “It should be a sparring partner with you,” says Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s design chief. “It shouldn’t take your thoughts verbatim. It should push back.” Perhaps this is predictable from a product carrying the slogan “keep thinking.” But Claude’s quirky (and, at times, passive-aggressive) personality sets it apart from the competition. That’s on purpose, Lewenstein explains. “I find that to be a truly astonishing experience where I’m like, ‘Oh, you are not a sort of slavish executor of my vision. We are coproducing this outcome together.’ I think that’s really powerf…

Advocacy groups and experts condemned YouTube for serving up low-quality artificial intelligence-generated videos to its most vulnerable audience: children. In a letter to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of YouTube’s parent company Google, children’s advocacy group Fairplay expresses “serious concern” about the spread of AI-generated videos on both YouTube and YouTube Kids. The letter, which was sent on Wednesday morning, was signed by more than 200 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “This ‘AI slop’ harms children’s development by distorting their sense of reality, overwhelming their learning processes and h…

Usually, when Washington, D.C., commuters are inundated with mint green-tinted ads in March, it means the Shamrock Shake is back at McDonald’s. This year, the eye-catching color instead appears in a full-court-press ad campaign for prediction market platform, Kalshi, which uses that shade in all its branding. Unlike seasonal milkshake ads, though, the targeted barrage of billboards, bus stop signs and metro station posters isn’t meant to reach all residents within the nation’s capital; just lawmakers and their staffers. It’s all part of a big bet by Kalshi to avoid regulation—one that seems destined to not pay out. Kalshi has launched an advertising blitz in …

As you have probably heard, most of human history, civility was not the default setting. Societies were rougher, hierarchies more brutal, and interpersonal interactions often governed by blunt displays of power and overt physical aggression rather than kind or cordial exchanges. In medieval societies, for instance, everyday interactions were far less restrained by norms of politeness. Status determined how you were treated, and those with power often exercised it quite openly. Rudeness, intimidation, and direct confrontation were not social faux pas so much as ordinary features of life in rigidly stratified societies. Fortunately, we have come a long way. Today, succe…

In 2019, Colorado adopted a law prohibiting conversion therapy for minors. It defined the controversial term as any practice or treatment attempting “to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” But a talk therapist from the state, Kasey Chiles, said the law inhibited her right to free speech in her practice—and as of a ruling on Tuesday, March 31, the Supreme Court voted overwhelmingly in her favor. The Supreme Court decided 8-1 to strike down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, setting a precedent that could undermine similar laws in 23 states and the District of Columbia. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch justified …

In his very public standoff with the Pentagon recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI should never be used to kill without humans involved. The technology is capable, he said. What it isn’t capable of is handling the unexpected, the messy reality that no algorithm can plan for. That lesson is true in war and in almost every corner of work and life. A few weeks ago, AI seemed unstoppable. Now, nearly every organization I speak with is struggling with reliability, usability, and measurable impact. The reason is simple. These models excel in controlled conditions, but they falter in the real world. That gap, what we call the “execution frontier,” is where hum…

If you’ve been thinking about joining Sam’s Club, you may want to act fast: The annual membership fee will go up $10 starting next month. The Walmart-owned chain of warehouse stores has been emailing existing members this week to alert them of the price increases. Effective May 1, a standard Sam’s Club membership will cost $60, up from $50, while the cost of a Plus membership will increase to $120 from $110. The company is clearly trying to push more people to its higher-cost Plus membership, as it’s also upped the cap on its 2% cash back rewards these members can earn—from $500 annually to $750. The company confirmed the price increases to Fast Company and indic…