Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates, has a low-key terrifying question she throws at those interviewing for a role at her startup. The 23-year-old recently raised a $35 million Series A for Phia, the AI shopping agent she cofounded in April 2025 with her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni. The startup, which has since garnered more than 1 million users and grown revenue elevenfold, is currently valued at around $185 million. Gates recently joined Brian Sozzi, Yahoo Finance executive editor, on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast and revealed her go-to interview question f…

In 2020, Waymo began offering fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix, turning the city into the closest thing the U.S. has to a real-world laboratory for autonomous vehicles. What began as a cautious pilot has since grown into a sprawling robotaxi network that now includes freeway travel and service to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Since then, Waymo has expanded to cities including San Francisco and Austin, while rivals like Tesla and Zoox are racing to deploy their own autonomous fleets. But the technology’s spread has come with a steady stream of logistical and political questions for the cities hosting it (especially since Phoenix, with its wide r…

Today Adobe is launching the public beta of its new AI assistant for Photoshop Web and Photoshop Mobile. The company’s impressive new assistant technology enables anyone to do seemingly flawless photo editing—Nano Banana style—by prompting the apps. Then it ups its power by giving you easy and precise ways to interact with that software—whether it’s via voice or using your finger to navigate the interface. Photoshop Mobile and Web have included AI features for a while. The web version already had Adobe Firefly generative AI features like generative fill and generative expand. The previous mobile version of Photoshop became truly usable because it smartly integrated AI to …

Thermal pools, hammams, banyas, onsens, shvitzes, cold plunges, steam rooms, and saunas: Hot and cold water, and the communal experience of steam and sweat, has been a pillar of social and wellness cultures across millennia. Now a new crop of brighter and busier spaces known as social bathhouses seek to re-create the benefits of communal bathing with a callout to today’s overstressed, always-connected culture. As one bathhouse owner says, “You’re half naked, your phone’s in the locker, everyone’s going through something together.” There isn’t a comprehensive count of social bathhouse openings, but there’s a sense that it’s a nascent category in American fitness culture…

In the late 2010s, at the height of the direct-to-consumer boom, Framebridge founder Susan Tynan was green with envy. Many other venture-backed startups from the era—like Casper, Away, and Glossier—were growing much faster than her custom framing business. While these other buzzy brands focused on acquiring customers and growing revenue, Tynan was using her $81 million in venture funding to tackle more arduous operational issues, like building factories and hiring hundreds of craftspeople to make frames by hand. Eleven years into the business, Tynan’s slow, steady approach to growth is paying off. Framebridge now has 750 employees, 500 of whom work at the company’s fou…

There’s a focus on protecting our personal data now, perhaps more so than ever before, be it from foreign powers, Big Tech, or Elon Musk’s DOGE. Consumers are wary about where their data is going, what it’s being used for, and how, or if, they can put up safeguards, especially while using tech tools like search engines or AI assistants. With several AI tools and assistants hitting the market over the past couple of years—Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta’s Llama, among many others—much of our data, queries, and summaries are being fed to large tech companies, used to train their artificial intelligence models. While some users may not mind, it could turn others off, w…

For most social media companies, getting users to doomscroll as much as possible is the name of the game. But Pinterest is now encouraging its young users to put their phones away during class. The mood board app is currently demoing a new pop-up for users aged 13 to 17 in the U.S. and Canada that will prompt them to stop scrolling and close the app during class, according to a report from The Verge. “Focus is a beautiful thing,” a screenshot of the prompt reads. “Stay in the moment by putting Pinterest down and pausing notifs until the school bell rings.” The pop-up is set to appear between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on school days, and Pinterest plans to roll out the test t…

Nike isn’t the only household corporate name to announce significant layoffs this week. Just a day after the sporting goods giant announced layoffs, citing a further embrace of automation, social media giant Pinterest has announced it will cut jobs. The driving factor here? Artificial intelligence. Here’s what you need to know about the Pinterest layoffs. What’s happened? On Tuesday, the image-sharing social media platform Pinterest announced it plans to lay off around 15% of its workforce. The company made the announcement in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In that filing, Pinterest said that its board of director…

As we scroll through our feeds, it’s not unusual to stumble upon AI-generated slop—the kind of empty, nonsensical content that’s unmistakably artificial. You click on one, and before you know it, your feed’s flooded with more of the same. It’s left users craving the authenticity they once savored—a pervasive frustration spreading across social media Pinterest has not been immune to the phenomenon. Described by Futurism as “strangled by AI slop,” the platform has been “engulfed in a torrent of uncanny AI-generated content, drowning out the human-made inspiration that once thrived there.” Amid a surge of complaints, the platform has rolled out new generative AI cont…

Investors in Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) are waking up to a wall of red this morning. The stock price of the popular digital image-sharing board has fallen off a cliff after the company reported its Q4 2025 results yesterday. Here’s what you need to know. Pinterest’s Q4 2025 results From a quick glance, Pinterest’s results for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 didn’t look too bad. The company reported some impressive gains in a couple of key metrics. Those metrics include: Total revenue: $1.32 billion (up 14% year over year) Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 619 million (up 12% year over year) However, despite those gains, the company’s $1.32 billi…

Pinterest shares (NYSE: PINS) are skyrocketing in premarket trading this morning after the company announced Q4 results for its fiscal 2024 yesterday. PINS stock is currently up over 22% to above $41 per share as of the time of this writing. It hasn’t seen that price point seen since last July. Here’s what you need to know about Pinterest’s latest results and its surging stock. Pinterest’s revenue and growing user base shine in Q4 Almost any way you look at it, Pinterest had a great Q4, with two metrics really seeming to have made investors happy: Revenue: $1.15 billion Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 553 million For its fourth quarter, Pinterest ge…

Pinterest, a platform Futurism described as “being strangled by AI slop,” is not having a great day. The image-based social media company yesterday released its third-quarter earnings and, despite a 17% increase in revenue year-over-year (YOY), its shares took a tremendous tumble. Pinterest stock (NYSE: PINS) dropped about 20% through after-hours trading and into premarket on Wednesday, sitting at 18.6% down at the time of publishing. We’ll get into the “AI slop” factor, but first it’s worth noting that Pinterest’s revenue might have improved YOY, but it only just met Wall Street’s expectations of $1.05 billion, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC.…

In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead. Read more How YouTube Ate TV…

When the NFL Draft comes to Pittsburgh next week, civic leaders will be using the spotlight to celebrate football’s Steelers—and the city’s growing reputation as a technology and artificial intelligence hub. The events include an AI pitch competition where judges including area native Mark Cuban will award startups from a 1.75 million prize pool—with preference given to companies with a presence in Pennsylvania. There’s a growing number of startups that fit that bill. As the name suggests, VC firm Valley Capital Partners is based in Silicon Valley. But for the past few years, firm general partner Mitchell Kokko has been living across the country in Pittsburgh. The f…

Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) was never really meant to serve Pittsburgh. When the modern airport opened in 1992, it was built as a hub for U.S. Airways, primarily serving as a connection point for passengers heading elsewhere. Tens of millions of passengers used PIT annually, though only a small number of them were actually flying into or out of Greater Pittsburgh. Most stayed in the terminal, leaving one gate only to enter another, which was fine—until it wasn’t. “In 2004, the hub went away. Passengers plummeted. All those connecting passengers left,” says Christina Cassotis, who came on as CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority in 2015. After years …

Yum Brands is delivering on its promise to shutter hundreds of Pizza Hut locations. Three months after the fast-food giant announced its intention to close 250 underperforming Pizza Hut restaurants during the first half of 2026, the chain’s U.S. footprint appears to be notably smaller, according to a Fast Company analysis. A review of local media reports, online review platforms such as Yelp and Google Reviews, and Pizza Hut’s own store locator tool has found more than 50 locations that have closed in recent months, spanning cities across the United States. The true tally is likely much higher. Ranjith Roy, CFO of Yum Brands, indicated on an earnings call in…

Pizza Hut is closing hundreds of “underperforming” locations nationwide, according to parent company Yum! Brands, which reported fourth-quarter 2025 earnings on Wednesday. The company said it will shutter about 3% of Pizza Hut’s U.S. locations, or some 250 locations in the first six months of 2026, as the fast-causal chain struggles amid competition from Dominos Pizza and an overall decline in store sales and consumer demand. Fast Company has reached out to Pizza Hut for a list of locations that will be closing. Globally, Pizza Hut opened over 440 new restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2025 and nearly 1,200 restaurants in 2025, in 65 countries. Taco Bell…

Pizza Hut could soon be up for sale. Yum Brands, Pizza Hut’s parent company, said Tuesday it’s conducting a formal review of options for the brand, which has struggled to compete in a crowded pizza market. Yum CEO Chris Turner said Pizza Hut has many strengths, including a global footprint and strong growth in many markets. Pizza Hut has nearly 20,000 stores in more than 100 countries, and its international sales were up 2% in the first nine months of this year. China is its second-largest market outside the U.S. But Pizza Hut gets nearly half its sales from the U.S., where it has around 6,500 stores, and U.S. sales fell 7% in the same period. Pizza Hut was lo…

A Planned Parenthood affiliate just settled an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over claims of discrimination against white employees, in a notable example of the agency’s ongoing focus on DEI-related discrimination. The $500,000 settlement will put an end to an EEOC investigation against Planned Parenthood’s Illinois chapter, which was initiated by employee complaints that the organization allegedly “segregated employees by race, subjected white employees to harassment, and engaged in disparate treatment against white employees regarding terms, conditions, and privileges of employment,” according to the agency. The EEOC found that Planned …

Few media brands scream “straight” quite like Playboy. Since the 1950s, the men’s lifestyle magazine has been best known for its photos of nude and scantily clad women (aka Playmates)—and, of course, for its iconic bunny mascot. But those who’ve been paying attention, Playboy has quietly undergone an editorial transformation. Since November, the magazine has relaunched its print edition (previously halted in 2020), started a Substack newsletter blending archival material with original writing, and introduced new Playmates to the world. It’s all been under the advice of Phillip Picardi, who was announced on March 11 as Playboy’s new chief brand officer and editor-in-ch…