Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Usually the epitome of good humor, my friend was seething. She had devised a zany and creative marketing idea for her firm. Securing the budget, designing a content strategy, hiring a creative agency, and then doing all the related work had consumed Alex and her team for a full six months. This was on top of their already demanding jobs. And then the unthinkable happened. “Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the idea—my idea—with the CEO and CMO.” I watched her pace around my kitchen, her face getting redder and redder. “While he didn’t exactly say he’d done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his.…

My new favorite creator on TikTok is Apple. Yes, that Apple. On March 4, Apple launched its newest product, the head-turningly affordable $599 MacBook Neo. That same day, the company also deleted all of the content that once populated its TikTok page and started over. Its new videos—on view there are now 15—run the gamut from a clip inspired by Steve Jobs’s original introduction of the 1984 Macintosh to a cutesy animation of the Mac finder icon giggling and blushing. The videos have consistently debuted in batches of three, each corresponding to one of the brand colors associated with the Neo. This TikTok refresh is a clear play to cater to the audience that Apple…

Nike and U.S. Soccer just revealed the official team jerseys for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and they’re the perfect blend of something old and something new. The U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) kits include two distinct home and away jersey designs that take visual inspiration from the American flag. The home “stripes kit” features classic rippling red and white waves; the away “stars kit” highlights subtle shining stars on a dark navy backdrop. The designs will be worn across all 27 U.S. Soccer national teams (including men’s and women’s, youth, and senior teams) in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup, which will conclude with a final match on home soil at New Y…

A government shutdown, war in the Middle East, and storms: airline passengers in the U.S. are facing quite a number of issues right now. On Sunday, 10,740 flights were delayed and another 3,249 were canceled within, into, or out of the U.S., according to FlightAware. On Monday, those numbers rose to 12,926 and 4,863, respectively. More than half of flights into and out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport (ATL) were delayed Monday, while over a third of those into or out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA) were canceled. A similar pattern followed on Monday, and by 8 a.m. ET on Tuesday there were 1,156 delays with another 215 cancellations. Why is…

A new case in front of labor regulators could answer a question many workers might have contemplated. Can your employer fire you for speaking out against the CEO? During a hearing this month, the National Labor Relations Board—the federal agency tasked with enforcing labor law—weighed in on a case involving software company Atlassian, which reportedly fired an engineer in 2023 for criticizing the CEO over a restructuring plan that led to job losses. The NLRB argued that Atlassian had illegally fired the employee, Bloomberg reported this week, after obtaining a transcript of the hearing through a Freedom of Information Act request. The employee in question, Denise …

Career disruption is accelerating across the economy—and few people have navigated it more boldly than Maryam Banikarim. The former CMO of Univision, Gannett, and Hyatt, and host of The Messy Parts podcast, Banikarim shares hard-won wisdom about C-suite politics, and what it means to ultimately bet on yourself. Growing up in Iran during the time of revolution, Banikarim offers a unique perspective on the current Middle East conflict—and her determined search for hope amid the chaos. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapi…

By now you may have heard about the so-called “Gen Z pout,” a selfie face pose that comes as a response to the now “cringe” millennial duck face made popular by the Olsen twins in the 2000s, who would purse their lips to look pouty and suck in their cheeks when posing. Here’s what to know about the newest Gen Z slang. What exactly is the Gen Z pout? This week, a bunch of articles came out about this new trend and the nuances surrounding it that the untrained eye might miss. The pose has been seen on the faces of celebs such as Love Island’s Iris Kendall, or actresses Rachel Sennott, Lily-Rose Depp and Ariana Greenblatt. “If millennials pursed and pointed ou…

For the past several months, the food scientists at PepsiCo have been working overtime to dream up new products that meet young consumers’ health and wellness demands. First, there was a new Starbucks coffee protein drink. Then, there were dustless Cheetos. And now, the company’s latest innovation is Doritos Protein. Doritos Protein launched in select retailers this month and come in two different flavors: classic Nacho Cheese and Sweet & Tangy BBQ. One 28 gram serving of these chips contains 10 grams of protein and 150 calories, compared to the meager two grams of protein in a 28 gram, 150 calorie serving of standard Doritos Nacho Cheese. And, unlike regular Dor…

Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology …

It’s still more than two years until the cauldron lights up for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but we now know what the multibillion-dollar global sports spectacle will look like. The design team at LA28, the local organizing committee for the games, has given Fast Company a preview of the concepts and visuals that will guide the look and feel of the 2028 Olympics. The design approach is conceptually based on the superbloom, a natural phenomenon sometimes experienced in Southern California when an unusually wet winter leads to an explosively colorful spring bloom of wildflowers. The LA28 design approach uses bright, almost neon tones and an abstract graphic …

The world of public relations has always been about making a splash. And in an age of more and more media clutter, breakthrough ideas have never been more important. To create that can’t-miss-it buzz, this year’s most innovative PR firms paired an A-list Hollywood actor with an A-list Hollywood director, staged a surprise pop-event in a major urban transportation hub, enlisted some of the biggest stars from the booming world of women’s sports, and employed some creative grammar to stir up social media chatter. Giant Spoon created a campaign for the emerging electric vehicle brand Lucid that was essentially a short action film, directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari…

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies …

Americans’ outlook on the job market has turned increasingly pessimistic, a surprisingly negative shift given the low unemployment rate but one that likely reflects an ongoing hiring drought. Just 28% of workers in a quarterly Gallup survey conducted late last year said now is a “good time” to find a quality job, with 72% saying it is a bad time. Those figures are a sharp reversal from just a few years ago, in mid-2022, when 70% said it was a good time. Americans have quickly gotten more pessimistic: As recently as late 2024, just under half of workers still said it was a good time to search for a job. The current survey was conducted during the final three months of 20…

The state of behavioral health tells two different stories. On one hand, the crisis is deepening: 62% of U.S. adults now experience mental health challenges, up from 44% just a decade ago. Severe mental illness has climbed from 10% to 15% over that same period, according to third-party research commissioned by Qualifacts (research not available publicly). On the flip side, there are signs of genuine progress. The stigma around seeking care is finally lessening, with treatment rates rising from 45% to 52% between 2014 and 2024. Mental health and substance use spending increased 55% from 2015 to 2022, adding 170,000 critical jobs to the behavioral health workforce d…

In business conversations today, there’s generally an eye roll when someone brings up “sustainability” or “ESG.” Once a favorite of investors, boards, and marketers, sustainability has been politicized, deprioritized, and in many cases quietly shelved. At the same time, a new headline dominates: AI. AI is the strategy, the investment thesis, the growth promise. It’s exciting…and it should be. But amid the whiplash, we’ve stopped talking about something far more long-lasting: purpose. Even at the most recent meetings of global leaders in Davos, energy and climate played a role, but purpose took a backseat. And that’s a problem. ESG is not purpose. AI is not pur…

With help from AI, I finally tackled some computer chores that I’ve been putting off for months. My Downloads folder is cleaner than it’s been in ages. The photos that OneDrive blandly sorted by month are now arranged into folders by event. The obscure, unpurchasable jazz album I ripped from YouTube ages ago is now properly sliced into separate tracks, tagged with metadata, and sitting inside my media server at last. Instead of spending hours on those tedious tasks myself, I delegated them to Manus, an AI assistant whose desktop app is free to download for Mac and Windows. Manus launched in March of last year with an emphasis on being able to accomplish tasks auto…

The AI behemoth Anthropic released a report this week about the widening “AI skills gap.” In it, the research suggests that a widening gap may be emerging between those who use AI frequently for work and those who don’t. The report data shows that those with at least six months of experience with the company’s chatbot, Claude, have a higher success rate when collaborating with the system than those without. This can lead to an advantage in an ever-changing labor market landscape as AI becomes an integral part of the job market. In an interview with TechCrunch, Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, spoke about how the report does not yet prove a broader sh…

Austria’s governing coalition on Friday announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a string of other countries in drawing up restrictions for young people. Alexander Pröll, the official in Chancellor Christian Stocker’s office responsible for digitization, said that draft legislation will be drawn up by the end of June. He said that “technically modern methods” of age verification will be used that allow users to verify their age while respecting their privacy. It wasn’t immediately clear when the plan to introduce a minimum age, which will need parliamentary approval, might take effect. Australia in 2024 took the lead, becoming the first co…

As the government shutdown drags on, having devastating effects on Transportation Security Administration staffing, millions of Americans continue to face long lines at TSA checkpoints at airports nationwide. With the busy Easter holiday travel weekend around the corner, wait times are expected to worsen as the number of travelers increases. If you have a flight scheduled in the days ahead, here are some travel gadgets that can help make your TSA wait times more bearable. Battery packs for long TSA lines Thanks to modern smartphone batteries, which can last a day or more, you ordinarily don’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice if you have …

Some of us old-timers fondly remember the satisfying clickity-clack of a physical smartphone keyboard. Back when email was king and multi-paragraph arguments on social networks were few and far between. Well, if you’re someone who longs for the days of firing off missives at breakneck speed, I’ve got good news: The physical keyboard is experiencing a renaissance, and it’s looking like it’s not just a nostalgic gimmick. Yes, hardware keyboards are officially making a comeback, and there are a few devices leading the charge that you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite Now, Unihertz is no stranger to this market. The company already ma…

At last, after seven months of public beta testing, Turntable is available today in the latest release of Adobe Illustrator. Presented at the 2024 edition of the Adobe Max conference as a sneak preview, the tool uses generative AI to transform any 2D vector illustration into a 3D object that you can turn around its vertical axis, as if it were on a clay modeling turntable. When it came out, its magicks left every Illustrator user cheering. If you have ever used Illustrator to craft a vector illustration—from a logo design to an animation character—it’s understandable why people were so excited. “The idea for Turntable originated from a consistent theme we heard direct…

Another round of layoffs has hit the tech industry, this time at SaaS giant Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL). The job cuts reportedly came out of the blue for most affected employees, with many receiving an early-morning email announcing their job loss just hours before they were scheduled to go into the office. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On early Tuesday morning, Oracle employees around the world began reporting on social media that they had received an email from the company informing them that their employment had been terminated. According to these reports, the emails began arriving in employees’ inboxes at around 6 a.m. local …

To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow, or complete darkness. I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp, and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echol…

For nearly four years now, the conversation about generative AI has revolved almost exclusively around productivity, threatened jobs, automatable tasks, efficiency, and competitiveness. But there is a largely underestimated dimension to this revolution: its cultural effects. AI is not just transforming how we work; it is transforming how we are together, how we trust each other, how we communicate, and how we organize ourselves. To measure this, it helps to borrow a framework from Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD whose book The Culture Map identifies eight dimensions along which the cultures of the world differ. Applied to artificial intelligence, Meyer’s eight dimen…

While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: “Why has it taken so long to return to the moon?” After all, NASA had the know-how and technology to send humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years ago as part of the Apollo program. And, as another tour guest reminded us, computers today can do so much more than they could back then, as evidenced by the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets. Shouldn’t it be easier to get to the moon than ever before? The truth is that sending humans into space safely continues to be difficult, especially as missions increase in complexity. New …