Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

America’s leading public storage provider, Public Storage (NYSE: PSA), has announced plans to acquire one of its main competitors, National Storage Affiliates Trust (NYSE: NSA), further solidifying its position as the dominant storage provider in the country. Here’s what you need to know about the proposed merger, and how the news is affecting the companies’ stock prices. What’s happened? Yesterday, Public Storage announced plans to acquire one of its main competitors, National Storage Affiliates. As of December 31, Public Storage operated 3,533 self-storage facilities across 40 states. As of the same date, National Storage Affiliates Trust operated 1,063 …

Pop star Zara Larsson is the internet’s newest it girl. After a wave of viral hits, including her latest album’s title track “Midnight Sun” and her feature on PinkPantheress’ “Stateside” remix, the Swedish singer cemented herself as the next big thing in pop music. But fame doesn’t come without controversy, as Larsson learned when she revealed to her fanbase that she uses generative AI. The discourse began when Larsson posted about watching AI-generated content on TikTok. Larsson first reposted an image from the account Ai Fruit Stories, a page posting AI animations of—you guessed it—drama between anthropomorphic foods. Larsson then posted a selfie with the c…

Sundar Pichai is guiding Google through the AI revolution with a leadership style that balances bold innovation with thoughtful responsibility. View the full article

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 …

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…

A newsletter about the state of the product job market recently went viral in the design corner of the internet. It’s exposing a widespread debate about whether the role of the designer is narrowing in the age of AI. On March 24, Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product developer and author of the business Substack Lenny’s Newsletter, published an article featuring exclusive data on the state of tech hiring in early 2026. The data was collected by TrueUp, a tech job marketplace tracker. Overall, it paints a positive picture for the tech job market. But for designers it points to a moment of hiring uncertainty. TrueUp found that design roles have plateaued since …

Today, April 6, 2026, is Easter Monday. It’s the final part of the long Easter Weekend, which runs from Good Friday through today. In several countries around the world, including Canada and Australia, Easter Monday is a public holiday. But what about here in America, and what stores and institutions are closed for the day? Here’s what you need to know. Is Easter Monday a national holiday? No. Although Easter Monday is observed as a national holiday in dozens of countries worldwide, it is not a national holiday in the United States. This means that federal agencies—at least those not affected by the ongoing partial government shutdown—will operate as usua…

I started working as a remote employee back in 2006, long before it was common. I talked to my colleagues during the day, sure, but they were all in an office with cubicles. I worked alone. Later in my career, I was part of an executive team at a software company, making decisions about budget and strategy. So when I started my own business in 2022, many aspects felt like a natural extension of the way I’d always worked. Most advice about leaving corporate life focuses on the financial safety net: savings, pricing your services, and side hustles. But money isn’t the only reason people leave solopreneur life and go back to a nine-to-five. Some people are gen…

Roblox is updating its child protection features again, rolling out restricted Kids accounts for users ages 5 through 8 and Roblox Select accounts for users 9 through 15, both with parental controls and other age-based restrictions. Users will be required to go through an age verification process, generally based on live selfies or a government-issued ID—or be effectively restricted to content approved for the youngest users. Since January, age verification has also been required to use the platform’s chat features, with users under 18 generally restricted to chatting people relatively near to them in age. “We’ll be going through a transition period where we’ll…

When I got the email, I was certain I was going to be murdered. Sent through an obscure contact form on my website, the message said that Jason Alexander had read an article I wrote for FastCompany, and wanted to interview me for his podcast. All I had to do was show up at a nondescript building next to Warner Brothers Studios, come around the back, and enter through an unmarked basement door. “Yeah, right” I thought. “George from Seinfeld wants to talk to me about AI? Scammers sure have gotten creative!” Still, I couldn’t entirely write off the message. Jason Alexander does indeed have a podcast. And a quick check with Gemini showed that the person wh…

The long-running rumor that Mark Zuckerberg is secretly a robot is starting to feel a lot less like a joke. According to a report by the Financial Times, Meta is building out a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D” version of its CEO that employees can interact with and get direct feedback from. Sources told the publication that the bot will be trained on his image, mannerisms, tone, speaking style and public statements to give employees a fully authentic Zuck experience. Zuckerberg himself is directly involved with training the AI avatar “so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it,” according to the Financial Times. He also star…

Adobe is rolling out the public beta for its Firefly AI Assistant later this month, turning complex creative workflows into a simple chat interface across applications like Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, or Lightroom. You type what you want, and the AI connects the dots behind the scenes to make it happen. Since it’s a multi-modal interface, it can tune with precision via context-aware control panels when needed beyond the text-based prompt. It’s a first step in what creative apps may become in the future, removing the complexity of user interfaces while keeping powerful control. If the final product works like the demo, the new Firefly AI Assistant will change the…

After rising by more than 580% in a single trading session yesterday, shares of Allbirds Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) fell this morning in premarket trading, at one point more than 30%. The steep rise and now potential fall in the stock price followed the company’s unexpected announcement that it intends to transition from a sustainable shoemaker to an AI compute infrastructure provider. But while AI-obsessed investors initially cheered the odd move, history suggests the pivot may be a challenging one to pull off in the long run. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, San Francisco-based Allbirds, whose wool footwear had been popular with Silicon …

Social media has fundamentally rewritten the rules of beauty. Trends that once took years to trickle from runway to consumer now emerge, peak, and drive real-world consultations within weeks. Consumers scroll past filler trends and noninvasive procedures during their lunch breaks and book appointments before dinner. The trend-to-treatment pipeline has never moved faster, and the stakes have never been higher. There’s a fundamental mismatch at the heart of the system: Aesthetic inspiration is social and collective, but aesthetic results are deeply personal. What works for one face, skin type, or bone structure won’t always work for another. Yet, consumers routinely mak…

The U.S.military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones. The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S.Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the U.S.-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced on April 10. The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which promp…

As visitors head into downtown Vancouver through the city’s False Creek Flats neighborhood, the first thing they’ll see is the Hive: a 10-story office building built out of wood and shaped like a giant honeycomb. Beneath its webbed exterior, the building is hiding a clever design system that keeps it safe from earthquakes by allowing it to wiggle, shake, and settle. The Hive, designed by the Toronto-based architecture studio Dialog, is the tallest seismic-force-resisting building made from mass timber in North America. By substituting mass timber for typical steel-and-concrete construction, the building is sequestering a total of 4,403 metric tons of CO2; equivalent …

While the court battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI may draw more eyes Monday, another case getting underway could carry far broader implications for personal freedom. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a case that will determine the legality of geofencing, a technique law enforcement uses to mine location history data to identify who was near the scene of a crime and may have been involved. Geofencing, in essence, draws a virtual perimeter around a crime scene. The government then obtains a warrant requiring tech companies to search their location data for anyone within that area during the relevant time frame. In this case, Google’s location his…

When Malibu launched its “Get Ready With Malibu Pink” campaign this spring, the rum brand had all the necessary ingredients for a modern influencer campaign. Creator partnerships with Sabrina Brier and other influencers, on-trend “get ready with me” style videos, all centered on the debut of a new flavored rum with guava, coconut, and pineapple. But there was also one element that was surprisingly new terrain for Malibu’s parent company Pernod Ricard: its first major campaign designed specifically for TikTok. A platform once off-limits Until very recently, alcohol brands like Malibu were completely absent from TikTok. But over the past two years, TikTok’s stron…

I have spent decades in the high-stakes world of finance, in rooms with CEOs, politicians, and men who run major organizations. On paper, these men have everything figured out. But when the doors close and the room gets quiet, a surprising truth tends to surface: They feel profoundly alone. They have golf partners, colleagues, and acquaintances. They can debate politics or dissect a balance sheet for hours. And they know who to rely on when it comes to resolving an issue in the business they know so well. But when life fractures, as it always does, these same capable men don’t know who to call. We are living through what the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Mu…

Information is a commodity. The real challenge is establishing trust in today’s world of content overload and automated answers. How can you tell who, among an array of self-proclaimed experts, really understands a topic? And more importantly, how can you instill that trust in others? It starts at the top. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 75% of respondents said CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but just 44% do so well. That’s a huge gap that highlights a leadership credibility challenge, playing out externally with customersand inside the workplace. 3 TRUST-BUILDING STRATEGIES These are three core principles I lean on to establ…

When markets swing, plans break, inboxes explode, and everyone starts saying the situation is “unprecedented” again, most teams do what humans have always done under pressure: they grip tighter. They add meetings. Escalate more decisions. Demand more updates. Work longer hours. And mistake motion for control. That response is understandable. It is also exactly how teams get slower, more political, and more exhausted at the moment they most need clarity. What’s the big idea? The teams that perform best in chaos rely less on heroics and more on habits. They do not magically become unflappable; they build simple, repeatable ways of working that reduce confusion, s…

After a long day in the office, you catch a sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror: Hair, frizzy. Skin, dry. Eyes, puffy. “Office air” has claimed yet another victim. The term, which has recently gone viral on TikTok, puts its finger on a complaint office workers have suffered in silence for years. Coined by content creator Noa Donlan, her videos documenting the phenomenon have recently amassed millions of views across TikTok and Instagram. “I first noticed it as a student, but it became unmistakable once I started working full-time four years ago,” Donlan told People in a recent interview. “I’d leave the house feeling put together, then catch myself in t…

“I’m fine”—a vast majority of women utter those two words reflexively in various scenarios, when they’re not, in fact, fine. Now, Megababe is tackling this so-called ‘comfort tax’ with an ad campaign designed to encourage women to better advocate for themselves. On Monday, the personal care brand unveiled a series of bright orange-and-white ads across New York City that underscore how women have normalized discomfort. The campaign marks Megababe’s first foray into social-first messaging. It comes alongside the results of a March survey it conducted, which found that 85% of women would rather be uncomfortable than inconvenience someone else. Women claiming to b…

Simone Stolzoff has a gift for asking questions that slice the soul. In his first book, The Good Enough Job, he asks how work came to be so central to our identities, and what we can do to rebalance our lives. He’s a journalist whose writing on the intersection of work, identity, and relationships has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and National Geographic. Now he’s back with a second book: How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. This time around, he unpacks why uncertainty generates so much anxiety, and what we can do about it. In a world where climate change is reshaping the actual landscape, politicians a…

Amazon can deliver anything—including, increasingly, eyeballs to advertisers. And now, its upcoming slate of content, including an adaptation of the best-selling novel Fourth Wing and a list of young adult content, is sure to have advertisers excited. The e-commerce giant held its annual Upfront event at the Beacon Theater in New York City on Monday night, showcasing new TV shows, movies, sports, and podcasting content destined for its Prime Video streaming platform and podcasting platforms. While there were big names in attendance—the event included appearances by Oprah Winfrey, Chris Pratt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael B. Jordan, among others—what stole th…