Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Americans often receive a lot of grief for being less internationally traveled than citizens of other countries. But in recent years, more Americans are traveling abroad than ever before. Numbers compiled by the digital magazine Travel and Tour World (TTW) show that in March 2025, 6.56 million Americans flew outside of the country. That’s 1.6% more than the same period a year earlier, and more than 22% more than in 2019—the year before the pandemic caused international travel to grind to a halt. TTW cites “pent-up demand, strong personal savings among affluent demographics, and a growing appetite for immersive cultural experiences” as the main reasons more Americans a…

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed a $7.1 million fine on a New York-based property management firm Thursday, accusing it of violating sanctions by managing luxury real estate properties for oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Gracetown Inc. had received 24 payments between April 2018 and May 2020 totaling $31,250 on behalf of a company owned by Deripaska. OFAC says it gave Gracetown notice that dealings with Deripaska were prohibited, but the firm proceeded anyway. Justice Department filings from 2022 connect Gracetown Inc. with U.K. businessman Graham Bonham-Carter, w…

Most technology companies treat brand or product names like marketing. That’s a mistake. Names are infrastructure—not cosmetic choices or launch-day deliverables. When names are wrong, everything built on top of them pays a quiet, compounding price. We tend to think of infrastructure as physical or technical systems: roads, power grids, cloud platforms. But infrastructure is really something more precise: It’s the invisible system that enables everything else to function. When it works, no one notices. When it doesn’t, nothing scales. Language behaves the same way. Before anyone buys a new technology, it must be named. Before they adopt it, they must talk about it…

When announcing her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift said, “You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive. . . . Not everyone can afford it.” She was encouraging people to have a healthy relationship with social media and not get sucked into online drama and endless scrolling. As a working mom with three kids, this hit me deeply—about much more than social media. I have spent a good portion of my adult life talking about productivity, apps, and tools to save time. But Swift used a different word: energy. I can do dozens of things to save time in my day, but if I don’t have any energy left, what have I really gained? …

The web wasn’t always like it is now. It used to be weirder—in a good way. And it still can be. After all, we all occasionally need a tranquil break amidst a hectic day—be it a beautiful sunset, the sight of a cat falling asleep on a windowsill, or even just the landscape rolling by as you stare out the window. That’s what the tool we’re about to go over is all about. It’s a way to look out a window—but not your window. Another person’s window. Right from your workday screen. On the surface, it may not appear practical—but arguably, it’s the most practical thing in the world. Even just a few moments of staring into a virtual window can inject something invalua…

CEO of Black Girls Code, Cristina Mancini shares her perspective on leaders treating DEI as a brand strategy rather than a true commitment. View the full article

A trial focused on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media and whether Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms is set to start in New Mexico with opening statements Monday. It’s the first stand-alone trial from state prosecutors in a stream of lawsuits against major social media companies, including Meta, over harm to children, and one that is likely to highlight explicit online content and its effects. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023. His team built the case by posing as kids through social media accounts, then documenting the arrival of sexual solicitations as well as the response by Meta, the owner of Facebook, Insta…

A triceratops skeleton that stood in a Wyoming museum for decades will be auctioned off, a rare instance of a museum-exhibited dinosaur going to the auction block just as the market for the prehistoric giants has hit record highs. The fossil, dubbed “Trey,” will be open for bidding from March 17 to 31 on Joopiter, an online auction platform founded by Grammy-winning artist and producer Pharrell Williams. It has a pre-auction estimate of $4.5 million to $5.5 million. Dating back more than 66 million years to the late Cretaceous period, Trey was discovered near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1993 by Lee Campbell and the late Allen Graffham, a commercial paleontologist who made n…