Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

For the first two-and-a-half years of the generative AI revolution, the AI arms race has been waged between competing companies seeking to make bank from the promise and potential of the technology. But things are maturing in the AI world—and with it, there’s another frontline for AI: the military. Scale AI, the company set up by Alexandr Wang, has been awarded what CNBC reports is a multimillion-dollar deal to help develop Thunderforge, which the U.S. Department of Defense calls “an initiative designed to integrate artificial intelligence into military operational and theater-level planning, and fusing cutting-edge modeling and simulation tools.” Wang told CNBC that …

Everyday Health Group, a division of Ziff Davis, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired theSkimm, the newsletter and media brand dedicated to giving women the information they need to make confident decisions. TheSkimm was cofounded by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg in 2012. They met in college, and then reconnected years later while working as news producers for NBC. The company began as a daily newsletter that was an essential daily news digest for millennial women (and men). Today, it offers multiple newsletters, podcasts, and a mobile app. It also houses Skimm Studios, which creates video and audio content, as well as SKM Lab, which allows brands to …

Fast Company’s Maria Jose Gutierrez Chavez reports on how millennials are taking over TikTok to share memories of life during the 2008 recession—and offer tips on how to survive. View the full article

The job market is tough right now: AI résumé filters, the rise of ghost jobs, and waves of industry-wide layoffs. Many workers cling tightly to their jobs in this environment, a phenomenon known as “job hugging.” But a surprising number of mid-career millennials aren’t scrambling to avoid redundancy. Instead, they admit they’d prefer an external push out the door because the alternative—voluntarily navigating a chaotic job market—feels far too risky. And experts say it’s a trend that should leave the cohort right below millennials worried. A recent survey of 2,000 Gen Z and millennial workers in the US by online education platform ELVTR found that 37% of mill…

Millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) are far more interested in buying homes today than they were just six months ago. That makes the group the only generation whose interest in homeownership has increased since September 2024. However, these same people are tending to put off the investment due to sky-high mortgage rates. The new data comes from an online survey of 2,230 adults conducted by Realtor.com. Six months ago, 15% of millennials said they were interested in buying a home. Now 23% are interested, according to the latest survey. Still, that doesn’t mean more 29- to 44-year-olds are actually buying homes. In a press release, Laura Eddy, vic…

As wealth inequality widens and billionaires become increasingly enmeshed with politics, the public is growing more and more disillusioned with the ultra-wealthy, and the role they play in society. It’s not just those with low or median incomes who feel that way. A majority of millionaires now say that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy; that the ultra-rich buy political influence; and that political leaders should do more to tackle extreme wealth, like increasing taxes. That’s according to a new poll from Patriotic Millionaires, a collection of high-net-worth individuals who advocate for more progressive taxes in order to close the wealth gap. The poll surve…

A Minecraft Movie just beat Captain America and Mario at the box office. The new film, inspired by the beloved brick-based video game and starring Jack Black and Jason Mamoa, pulled in $157 million at its domestic box office opening this weekend. That’s more than double analysts’ early prediction that the film would gross $60 million. It’s also well past the record of the previous top opener of 2025, Disney’s Captain America: Brave New World, which netted $88.5 million at its opening weekend—meaning A Minecraft Movie has now enjoyed the most successful opening weekend of the year. By video game-to-movie adaptation standards, the Minecraft film is also playing in a…

CEOs of Minnesota’s biggest companies signed a public letter calling for “immediate de-escalation of tensions” after weeks of silence following Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) descending upon the state, which has led to civilian deaths, abductions, economic stand-stills and a profound disruption of daily life. On Sunday, chief executives of more than 60 major corporations like Target, Best Buy, 3M and General Mills, called for “immediate de-escalation of tensions” in Minnesota. The letter came following federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse while he was on the ground. Weeks earlier, Renee Good, was also shot and killed b…

Minnesota continues to be the beating heart of nationwide anti-ICE movements with The Day of Truth and Freedom. Today, January 23, hundreds of businesses across the state are closing their doors in protest after community groups, faith-based organizations and unions came together to call for an “economic blackout.” “Minnesotans are coming together in moral reflection and action to stand together against the actions of the federal government against the state of Minnesota,” a declaration reads on the organizing website, ICE Out of MN. The day-long protest follows a series of tragedies that stem from the Department of Homeland Security’s January 6 deployment of…

Labor unions, faith organizations, and local businesses in Minnesota are calling for a statewide “collective pause” this Friday—in which they urge residents not to go to work, school, or do any shopping—in protest of the The President administration’s aggressive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Twin Cities and beyond. The action, called the “Day of Truth and Freedom,” is planned for January 23, and includes plans for a march in downtown Minneapolis at 2 p.m. Here’s what to know. What’s the situation with ICE in Minnesota? On January 6, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was deploying 2,000 officers to the M…

Just a short drive outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, the quaint city of Kannapolis is seeing a rapid economic revival. The city, which was traditionally known for its textile mills, has recently transformed into a research hub in the for Southeast. And right in Kannapolis’s city center, less than a ten minute walk from the Georgian-style city hall, sits Atrium Health Ballpark: the home of the Minor League Baseball team known as the Cannon Ballers. Over the last five years, the Cannon Ballers have played an increasingly vital role in Kannapolis’s revitalization. Throughout the course of a season, the team’s total attendance is around 200,000 people—a number m…

When Andrey Khusid cofounded Miro in 2011, the idea was simple: bring a whiteboard into the browser, and let people collaborate visually, not just with text. Now that digital canvas is evolving into what the CEO calls an “AI Innovation Workspace.” More than 100 million people use Miro these days, so the company’s ventures into AI are quickly reaching more than 250,000 organizations, including GitHub, Prudential, and Cisco. To serve those Fortune 500 companies, Miro now offers a platform for collaborative AI workflows with Sidekicks that work alongside teams on the canvas, and tools for turning rough sketches into clickable prototypes. The company, which sported a $17…

Most days, an email lands in my inbox with the promise to amplify my growth—my newsletter subscribers, the reach of my podcasts, the number of client leads, etc. I’ve gotten used to random people pitching me on their services, and some of the messages expertly prey on my insecurities as a business owner (“you’re leaving so much on the table,” et al.). I never answer any of them, but I sometimes wonder which ones might actually be legit. A few months back, I opened up the Assistant sidebar in my AI-powered browser when I was browsing one of these emails and asked if it looked suspicious (I think “this look sus?” was the actual prompt). It replied that yes, the message,…

AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the web—constantly. But website owners increasingly don’t want to give AI firms free rein. So they’re regaining control by cracking down on crawlers. To do this, they’re using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowed—or not—to scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some…

Where legislatures have refused to boost pay and benefits for workers, advocates have often taken the fight straight to voters. In recent years, voters in Michigan, Missouri, and Nebraska overwhelmingly backed higher state minimum wages and guaranteed paid sick leave at the polls. But despite that strong showing of support, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now trying to water down or even roll back the measures their constituents approved. In November, 58% of Missouri voters approved Proposition A, which raises the state minimum wage to $15 by 2026 and requires employers to provide paid sick leave. That level of support, said Missouri Jobs with Justice Polic…

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. Many companies forget AI-powered enterprise applications are just business apps at the end of the day. The reality is, AI is simply another arrow in our quiver, albeit incredibly more powerful. But what IT has done since generative AI exploded on the scene is frantically rush to deploy any and all possible applications, causing massive confusion and huge resource wastes, without delivering much …

Inside a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology late last year, scientists gave an AI system a new task: designing entirely new molecules for potential antibiotics from scratch. Within a day or two—following a few months of training—the algorithms had generated more than 29 million new molecules, unlike any that existed before. Traditional drug discovery is a slow, painstaking process. But AI is beginning to transform it. At MIT, the research is aimed at the growing challenge of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than a million people globally each year. Existing antibiotics haven’t kept up with the threat. “The number of resistant bacteria…

New York City is a city of walkers. More trips are made on foot than by car (41% versus 28%) and the city’s “80X50” climate action plan envisions that 80% of all trips by 2050 will be made either on foot, by biking, or by public transit. The problem is that pedestrian movement in the city has remained largely unmapped and underestimated—until now. Together with a team of researchers, Andres Sevtsuk, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has built what he says is the first complete model of pedestrian activity in New York City—and it’s a model that can now be applied to any U.S. city. The model, which maps foot traffic across al…

A new study from MIT that shows that AI might be poised to replace a lot more jobs than what initial estimates might predict. According to researchers, a hidden mass of data reveals that AI is currently capable of taking over 11.7% of the labor market. The new estimate comes courtesy of a project called The Iceberg Index, which was made through a partnership between MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a federally funded research center in Tennessee. According to its website, the Iceberg Index “simulates an agentic U.S.—a human-AI workforce where 151M+ human workers coordinate with thousands of AI agents.” In simpler terms, the tool is designed to simulate pr…

Mixed nuts are a common staple in many houses around the Christmas holidays. Their saltiness is a nice contrast to all the sweet festive treats that our kitchens fill up with at this time of year. But now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that two mixed nut products have the potential to make you very sick. Here’s what you need to know. FDA announced mixed nuts recall On December 5, the Food and Drug Administration posted a notice announcing the recall of two mixed nuts products. The nuts were sold under the Wegmans brand. Wegmans is a popular chain of grocery stores in the eastern United States. The nuts were manufactured by Mellace Family…

Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been indicted on charges they took bribes from sports bettors to throw certain types of pitches, including tossing balls in the dirt instead of strikes, to ensure successful bets. According to the indictment unsealed Sunday in federal court in Brooklyn, the highly paid hurlers took several thousand dollars in payoffs to help two unnamed gamblers from their native Dominican Republic win at least $460,000 on in-game prop bets on the speed and outcome of certain pitches. Clase, the Guardians’ former closer, and Ortiz, a starter, have been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, when MLB started investigatin…