Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

January was a long month, but we finally have some good news in 2025: Bookseller Barnes & Noble plans to open at least 60 new stores this year, topping last year’s record of 57 stores and marking a steady revival of its brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country. “[Barnes & Noble] is experiencing strong sales in its existing stores and has been opening many new stores after more than 15 years of declining store numbers,” the company told Fast Company. “In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019 . . . [The company] is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand…

When a city burns, people often zoom in on houses, the individual cells that make up the fabric of a community. After the tragic fires in Los Angeles earlier this month, many publications, this one included, published essays, case studies, and guides shedding light on how to fire-proof a house. These guides are crucial tools for people who’ve lost their homes and for those who will be responsible for rebuilding them. But many experts are arguing that fire-proofing individual houses is not enough. They say we need to fire-proof entire communities. “You can almost think of it as a domino effect,” says Michael Gollner, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Fire Re…

Picture this: A teenager stares at their phone, paralyzed by headline after headline about the climate crisis, political dysfunction, and societal division. They want to act but feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem. This scene plays out millions of times daily, and it represents a critical challenge for brands: 80% of Gen Z globally report being personally affected by climate change, yet their engagement with sustainable solutions is declining. Looking to the future, many young people are asking, “What’s the point?” Instead of feeling empowered to act, young people are becoming paralyzed by anxiety, overwhelmed by complexity, disillusioned by a lack of l…

As remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception, more U.S. professionals are redefining what it means to live and work well. With soaring living costs, healthcare hurdles, and burnout increasingly baked into American life, many are choosing to build their careers abroad. This shift isn’t just about finding cheaper rent or a temporary escape. It’s about discovering countries that actively welcome remote workers through smart visa policies, strong infrastructure, and communities that foster sustainable, fulfilling lifestyles. From Asia’s tech hubs to Europe’s historic towns, these 10 destinations are leading the remote work revolution and offering a chance to…

For a decade, Dr. Bronner’s has been a certified B Corp, a designation issued by the nonprofit B Lab that confirms a company has met certain environmental, social, and governance standards. But now the soap company is dropping its B Corp certification without plans to renew. Dr. Bronner’s says B Lab’s standards are weak, and that some multinational corporations are now using its seal—an encircled B, which became a symbol that businesses can be “a force for good”—as a form of greenwashing. Dr. Bronner’s mainly takes issue with B Lab’s increasing certifications of multinational corporations like Unilever Australia, Nespresso, and Nestle Health Science—and the fact that …

Former President Jimmy Carter has won a posthumous Grammy award. Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, died in December at age 100. Prior to his passing, Carter was nominated in the audio book, narration, and storytelling recording category at the 2025 Grammys for “Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration,” recordings from his final Sunday School lessons delivered at Maranatha Baptist Church in Georgia. Musicians Darius Rucker, Lee Ann Rimes and Jon Batiste are featured on the record. It’s Carter’s fourth Grammy. His posthumous Grammy joins his three previous ones for spoken word album. If the for…

When Meta launched its “AI Studio” feature for over two billion Instagram users in July 2024, the company promised a tool that would give anyone the ability to create their own AI characters “to make you laugh, generate memes, give travel advice, and so much more.” The company claimed the feature, which was built with Meta’s Llama 3.1 large language model, would be subject to policies and protections to “help ensure AIs are used responsibly.” But a Fast Company review of the technology found that these new characters can very easily become hyper-sexual personas that sometimes appear to be minors. Many of the AI characters that appear featured on Instagram’s home…

OpenAI released its newest reasoning model, called o3-mini, on Friday. OpenAI says the model delivers more intelligence than OpenAI’s first small reasoning model, o1-mini, while maintaining o1-mini’s low price and speed. The company says o3-mini excels in science, math, and coding problems. Developers can access o3-mini through an API, and can select between three levels of reasoning intensity. The lowest setting, for example, might be best for less difficult problems where speed of response is a factor. ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users can access OpenAI o3-mini starting today, OpenAI says, while enterprise users will get access in a week. The announcement comes…

In the ’90s, Dyson transformed the way we clean our homes by launching the most powerful vacuum cleaner the world had ever seen—one that used a cyclone, rather than suction, to extract dust. Three decades later, Dyson has incorporated this same technology into almost every kind of vacuum you could imagine, from robots to heavy-duty mops. Today, Dyson adds a new vacuum to its portfolio: One focused specifically on cars. Priced at $280, it’s three or four times more expensive than similar handheld vacuums by brands like Shark or Bissell, but it’s one of the most affordable products within Dyson’s range. The vacuum comes with three tools designed specifically for cleanin…

The Empire State Building is nobody’s idea of a hidden gem. The 1,472-foot Art Deco landmark of stone and steel dominates the streetscape and world view of New York City—and all of pop culture. From King Kong’s battle with biplanes to the annual ESB Run-Up to its iconic 86th Floor Observatory, the “World’s Most Famous Building” is both myth and monolith. This alone could not have explained what happened last June, though: The Empire State Building Observatory Experience was ranked the No. 1 attraction in the world in Tripadvisor’s 2024 Travelers’ Choice Awards: Best of the Best Things to Do. At 93 years young, the skyscraper became ostensibly the top attraction on the…

Despite growing up with a financial planner for a father, the idea of investing intimidated me well into my adulthood. From my point of view, investing seemed like a mysterious process. Not only was this magical money-making exercise conducted in an arcane language (what exactly is a NASDAQ, and why does it sound like something you treat with a special cream?), but it also required my dad to keep the TV in his office tuned to the world’s most mind-numbing broadcast, even though cartoons were just a channel away. It’s no wonder I grew up thinking that investing was boring and impossible to understand. And investment ambivalence is pretty common. A recent NerdWallet fin…

Art gallery, science exhibition and 21st century funhouse, Paradox Museum Miami takes guests on a tour through optical illusions and other enigmas geared for the age of Instagram. The 11,000 square-foot (1,000 square-meter) museum, housed in Miami’s trendy Wynwood arts and entertainment district, features more than 70 exhibits that challenge the imagination, executive director Samantha Impellizeri said. “It ebbs and flows between periods of highly tactile and interactive exhibit pieces and fully immersive photo opportunities where you yourself become the paradox and walk away with some really fun and unique social media content,” Impellizeri said. Paradox Museum has mo…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On a nationally aggregated basis, U.S. single-family home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are up 2.8% year-over-year, while U.S. condo prices have risen 0.4% over the same period. In much of the Midwest, Northeast, and Southern California, regional home prices have seen even stronger gains. However, some areas—particularly around the Gulf—are experiencing greater softness, with a few even undergoing home price corrections. Look no further than Florida. Among the 26 major Florida condo markets that ResiClub tracks, condo prices…

The Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek could not be accessed on Wednesday in Apple and Google app stores in Italy, the day after the country’s data protection authority requested information on its use of personal data. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it had also requested information from DeepSeek about data processing in relation to Irish users. DeepSeek last week launched a free AI assistant that it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent services. By Monday, the assistant had overtaken U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s App Store, sparking panic among tech stock investors. “The news of the withdrawal of the …

As fires burned tens of thousands of acres across Los Angeles County, officials were warning residents that the air was a “toxic soup” of pollution—fueled by the fact that not only vegetation but cars, buildings, homes, and all the plastics and electronics inside them were going up in flames. But to some residents’ surprise, the Air Quality Index (AQI) on their phones didn’t relay that same message. That’s because AQI doesn’t capture the full scope of air pollution—which, during the fires, was made up of toxins including lead, chlorine, and bromine. To give residents a fuller picture of what exactly was in the air around L.A., scientists with an air monitoring projec…

A viral TikTok video showing an empty book signing for an elderly author tugged at millions of hearts—until it was exposed as a marketing stunt. The book in question, Just Cuz, was reportedly written by Barbara Miller as a tribute to her late husband, Marv. “She wrote it as a way to deal with her grief,” the video’s voiceover explained. Posted last month, the video shows an empty bookstore with “Aunt Barb” setting up her books on a table to sign for customers who were nowhere in sight, followed by a dejected but hopeful “Aunt Barb”—and it quickly racked up more than 33 million views, sparking an outpouring of support. Hundreds of commenters pledged to buy the book and…

A grassroots effort to track price gouging has emerged in the form of a Google Sheet that’s now circulating on social media. Community members have reported Zillow listings of rental properties with substantial price increases –upwards of thousands of dollars – just as 150,000 California residents found themselves displaced. View the full article

The AI search firm Perplexity routinely lets users try out state-of-the-art large language models on its site, but the company moved quickly to put Chinese company DeepSeek’s new R1 model front and center in its user interface. That offers users a chance to find out what the buzz is all about, without sending their data through the DeepSeek app, which is hosted in China. While some AI thought leaders such as Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Scale AI’s Alexander Wang, and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey hurried to debunk or downplay DeepSeek’s achievements, Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas believes the Chinese company’s models are something special. “In the past few years, the…

Software increasingly makes the world go round. Without this critical digital infrastructure, the economy—and society at large—wouldn’t function. But as recent events like last year’s CrowdStrike outage have shown, enormous leaps in software power and complexity, including the integration of AI into the development process, ratchet up the potential for things to go sideways, fast. How can software teams better harness the supercharged new tools at their disposal? Here’s a look at five things that lie ahead. 1. As consumers lose patience with outages, developers make software more resilient For consumers, the CrowdStrike outage is just the tip of the iceberg…

Shares in Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI) are down around 4% in premarket trading this morning as of the time of this writing after surging over 17% yesterday on optimism about the company’s Q2 2025 earnings, which will be announced after the close of market today. But while investors are no doubt interested in learning how the storage and server solutions company performed in its most recent quarter, they are also eagerly awaiting news from the company on the filing status of its much-delayed Form 10-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Unless that form is filed within the next two weeks, Super Micro Computer (aka Supermicro) is at ris…

“What’s more motivating than a punch card?” That’s the simple idea behind a recent so-called “punch party” that creator @emiliamariehome hosted with friends. On January 24, @emiliamariehome posted a video on TikTok of her group of friends creating punch cards (think: loyalty cards) as a Galentine’s day activity. It quickly went viral, gaining over 1.5 million views. Because whether it’s scoring a free cappuccino at your local coffee shop or a fresh loaf of bread at an independent bakery, the satisfaction from punching that final hole in a punch card is unmatched. Now, social media users are hacking that dopamine hit to achieve their own goals, from dating to readi…

My mom used to always say, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” She was a very busy person who seemed to have endless energy and a knack for outperforming others in her real estate firm. While the origin of the quote isn’t clear, the idea is that someone who juggles several projects effectively probably has systems in place for prioritization and efficiency. This makes sense. But there is a point when said “busy person” hits overload. Tossing them one more ball could cause the person to drop all of them. About two-thirds of workers feel empowered to decline extra work, according to a recent report from résumé builder Resume Now, yet 59% feel fr…

Rural residents face unique challenges and barriers when it comes to accessing high-quality healthcare. Many rural areas do not have a hospital or medical center nearby, forcing residents to drive hours to the nearest doctor or healthcare clinic. This delays—and in some cases prevents—rural residents from receiving care quickly, efficiently and safely. Due in part to these barriers, rural patients take advantage of preventive care less often than their urban counterparts and face higher health risks, such as cancer, chronic respiratory disease, heart disease, stroke, and unintentional injuries. Women, specifically mothers, are among those most significantly impacted i…

Growing up in rural Northern California and later serving in the military, stationed in Mississippi, I experienced firsthand the stark disparities in access to quality goods. Even finding fresh, local produce often meant bypassing the grocery store for a farm stand because the desired options simply weren’t stocked. In many communities I lived in and visited, the available choices were severely limited, creating a significant market gap that persists today. This isn’t just a social issue I observed; it’s a massive missed revenue opportunity for retailers who are overly focused on saturated urban markets while overlooking the immense potential waiting in rural and Middle A…