Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Friday is the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics. But, if you’ve spent any time on TikTok over the past week, you might have already got a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes content courtesy of the athletes themselves. In 2024, the International Olympic Committee loosened its rules governing what athletes can capture and share on social media. The shift helped spark viral moments during the Paris Games, when Team USA rugby star Ilona Maher and Norway’s swimmer Henrik Christiansen, whose chocolate muffin reviews became an unlikely hit, took over TikTok feeds. This year, Olympians have already been posting vlogs of their journeys to the Olympic Village…

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…

Many news outlets have reported an increase—or surge—in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, diagnoses in both children and adults. At the same time, health care providers, teachers, and school systems have reported an uptick in requests for ADHD assessments. These reports have led some experts and parents to wonder whether ADHD is being overdiagnosed and overtreated. As researchers who have spent our careers studying neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, we are concerned that fears about widespread overdiagnosis are misplaced, perhaps based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the condition. Understanding ADHD as one end of a spectrum Discu…

Have you ever opened a jar of Crisco and proceeded to slather it all over your body? I have, in the summer of 1992. I was just exiting sixth grade, and my friend was over for an afternoon of suntanning. When I reached for the brown bottle of suntan lotion, my friend stopped me, “Let’s go look for your mom’s Crisco.” “Crisco???” I said. “Yes, it’s how my older sister gets so tan.” Although I was suspicious that vegetable shortening was good for my skin, I silenced my doubts when I pictured her older sister in my mind—she was gorgeous, popular, and bronze. From a young age, we have an immature relationship with authority. Psychologists call this authority bias, whic…

Wealthfront Corp. is looking to rake in the wealth after going public on Friday. The Palo Alto-based automated digital wealth platform raised $486 million after selling 43.6 million shares, putting the company’s valuation at roughly $2 billion. Wealthfront shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “WLTH.” The company made more than 34.6 million shares of common stock available for the IPO for $14—an offering that expires on Monday, December 15. The stock was up around 4% by mid-afternoon on Friday afternoon after trading began. To mark the occasion, the company’s leadership—including CEO David Fortunato, cofounder and chairman Andy Rachleff, a…

December 15, 2025—the deadline for enrolling in a marketplace plan through the Affordable Care Act for 2026—came and went without an agreement on the federal subsidies that kept ACA plans more affordable for many Americans. Despite a last-ditch attempt in the House to extend ACA subsidies, with Congress adjourning for the year on December 19, it’s looking almost certain that Americans relying on ACA subsidies will face a steep increase in healthcare costs in 2026. As a gerontologist who studies the U.S. healthcare system, I’m aware that disagreements about healthcare in America have a long history. The main bone of contention is whether providing healthcare is the res…

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…

Fintech firm Mercury recently dropped some data that made me smile. It ranked the top five coffee shops powering founders in San Francisco based on actual transaction data: Sightglass, CoffeeShop, Equator, Saint Frank, Ritual. I’ve built Octolane with my cofounder, Rafi, from every single one of them. But here’s what the data doesn’t show: the $500,000 investment term sheet I negotiated over a cortado at Cafe Réveille. The $800,000 deal I closed while sitting next to a grad student cramming for finals. The three customers who became friends, then advocates, then our biggest champions, all because we met first over coffee, not Zoom. When I was in high school, I cle…

Last Saturday, more than six million people held their breath as Alex Honnold took his first step up Taipei 101. The Free Solo climber, who went on to ascend Taiwan’s tallest building without the safety of a rope and harness, drew crowds all around the building, as well as on Netflix, where the ascent was live-streamed as part of a show called Skyscraper Live. Some of these people had likely already watched Honnold scale the 3,000-foot rock wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan. But for many, the climber’s ascent up a man-made structure was likely an introduction to an altogether different kind of climbing: not on the face of a cliff, but the side of a building. This type…

The market for obesity and diabetes treatments remains scorching hot, funneling billions in sales to Eli Lilly and fueling a bidding war over another drugmaker. Lilly said Thursday that its top-selling drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, brought in more than $10 billion combined during the recently completed third quarter. That made up over half of the drugmaker’s $17.6 billion in total sales. Separately, Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk announced plans to buy Metsera Inc. in a deal that could be worth up to $9 billion. That came more than a month after U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc. made a nearly $5 billion bid for Metsera, which has no drugs on the market but is developi…

Starbucks‘ chief technology officer Deb Hall Lefevre resigned without a permanent replacement, according to an internal memo sent to corporate staff on Monday, seen by Reuters. The memo, written by Chief Financial Officer Cathy Smith, named Ningyu Chen, previously senior vice president of global experience technology, as interim chief technology officer. Lefevre’s resignation comes as Starbucks announced its second round of deep cuts in corporate roles, effective Friday, as CEO Brian Niccol pushes a tech revamp in stores to make labor more efficient, part of a turnaround strategy to revive flagging sales after six consecutive quarters of decline. Using AI to…

Apple’s iPhone sales soared to a new quarterly record during the holiday season, despite artificial intelligence blunders that prompted the technology trendsetter to get a helping hand from Google. The October-December results announced Thursday reflect the allegiance of Apple’s fans, who eagerly snapped up the latest iPhone 17 models even though the company still hasn’t delivered on its 2024 promise to smarten up the device’s Siri assistance with AI. Apple tried to offset its AI miscues with a new “liquid glass” design for the iPhone 17 and older models installed by way of a free software upgrade released last September. That formula helped produce iPhone sales of $85.…

“As someone who has tried almost every workout class on the planet, there is nothing like SoulCycle,” said TikTok creator Matt Trav in a video posted in early January. “The average human being cannot understand what blowing out the candle during the soulful song can do to the human psyche.” Nearly 40,000 people who liked the video seem to agree. “Absolutely nothing can beat NYC SoulCycle circa 2016,” one commenter wrote. “Literally like going to church,” another added. Across social media platforms, that renaissance is already underway. Devotees have been sharing nostalgia-laced photos from years past, unearthing old merchandise, and swapping stories in co…

Being a manager is never easy. And if you have never supervised others, the feat can be even more daunting. Managers are often spinning several plates: leading by example, setting and exceeding goals for your team, keeping workflow moving, providing support, and keeping employees motivated, engaged, and productive . . . all while adhering to your company’s objectives. If you haven’t done it before, it can be overwhelming. It’s almost like having to activate an entirely new part of your brain. Luckily, experts say creating “boss brain” is within anyone’s reach, regardless of leadership experience . . . or lack thereof. Listen and react to the feedback of your…

Prior to becoming the CEO of Lyft, David Risher didn’t post much on social media. That began to change just before his first day on the job, when Risher decided to sign up on the ride sharing platform as a driver. “I had no plan,” he says. “I just wanted to get in the car and see what it feels like to drive for Lyft and hear the rider’s story, but also experience it from a driver’s perspective.” At the end of that first outing, Risher revealed to the passenger who he was, and requested a selfie. He posted it on his personal LinkedIn account. “I drove for a couple more hours — and I didn’t tell anyone at Lyft I was doing this.” Since then, Risher has made a re…

On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and softwar…

My working days often unfold in either Zoom minimalist workplaces or glass-walled conference rooms with sleek windows, filled with entrepreneurs pitching ideas. As a marketing executive and startup mentor, I lead strategies for companies of various sizes, guide founders at startup accelerators TechStars and Founder Institute, and serve as an awards jury member. My calendar overflows with executive consultations, brand campaign planning, and deadline sprints. But between Christmas and New Year’s, I trade those sterile spaces for museum halls alive with color and history. It wasn’t easy getting out the door the first time I did this in 2021. I was filled with fears.…

The rapid growth of data centers during the AI boom has been a dominating narrative of 2025—and, in many instances, not a popular one. Across the country, communities have pushed back against data centers planned for their cities and states. Some have even turned to online petition sites to raise awareness and voice collective opposition to data center projects in their communities. One such site, the popular platform Change.org, says it has seen a significant spike data center-related petitions in recent months. Change.org saw at least 113 petitions that mentioned data centers in 2025, the platform shared with Fast Company, totaling around 50,000 signature…

In the Star Trek universe, the audience occasionally gets a glimpse inside schools on the planet Vulcan. Young children stand alone in pods surrounded by 360-degree digital screens. Adults wander among the pods but do not talk to the students. Instead, each child interacts only with a sophisticated artificial intelligence, which peppers them with questions about everything from mathematics to philosophy. This is not the reality in today’s classrooms on Earth. For many technology leaders building modern AI, however, a vision of AI-driven personalized learning holds considerable appeal. Outspoken venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for example, imagines that “the AI tut…

Meta’s Threads app is leaning into impermanence. Starting Monday, the platform is rolling out “ghost posts,” a new post format for sharing fleeting thoughts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Think Snapchat or Instagram Stories—except, for text. Unlike regular Threads posts, replies to ghost posts go straight to the user’s messaging inbox rather than inline, and only the author will be able to see who liked or responded to them. It’s a subtle but significant shift toward private engagement within a public feed, providing a middle ground of sorts between Twitter’s public discourse model and Instagram’s close-friends Stories. Meta says the feature is a…

On December 11, 2015, OpenAI arrived on the scene with a bang. Announced on the penultimate day of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an academic confab held in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, the organization had been in the planning for months (an infamous July 2015 meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel brought on board many of OpenAI’s key early staffers). But when it went public with an announcement and blog post, the community reacted with surprise. “This is just absolutely wonderful news, and I really feel like we are watching history in the making,” wrote Sebastien Bubeck, then a researcher at Microsof…

“I want to talk about something that I feel like maybe is a little controversial,” content creator Jaclyn Hill said in a video posted earlier this week. The OG beauty influencer got her start on YouTube well over a decade ago. She’s since grown across different social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok, where she has 8.5 million and 1.2 million followers, respectively. In the video, which has since racked up over 3.5-million views, she opens up about how she’s been struggling to get views on TikTok and feels like she’s “running through mud” to connect with her followers. “When you have a million followers, but you’re getting 30,000 views, this is jus…