Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Book lovers with aging Kindles might want to find a new e-reader soon, as Amazon is discontinuing support for its older devices next month. On May 20, the e-commerce giant is set to cut off support for devices released in 2012 or earlier, notifying active users of the affected devices via email. “These models have been supported for at least 14 years—some as long as 18 years—but technology has come a long way in that time, and these devices will no longer be supported moving forward,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fast Company. While the devices will still be able to power on, users will no longer be able to purchase or download new content for them. Additionall…

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…

There has been no shortage of retailers closing locations over the last few years as consumer behaviors shift online and foot traffic at brick-and-mortar stores continues to decline for many chains. And now, iPhone maker Apple has announced that it will join the ranks of companies closing locations, with multiple Apple stores to close for good this summer. Here’s what you need to know. Which Apple retail stores are closing? Yesterday, Apple confirmed that it will close three Apple retail stores in the United States. While there have been a few instances in the past of Apple closing a retail store, this is the first time the company has announced the closu…

Humanity is always aspiring to stretch itself to achieve new goals, including exploring new frontiers. The Artemis II crew accomplished this, traveling 252,000 miles away from Earth, the farthest any human has ever been before, breaking the Apollo 13 record. The four brave individuals are set to return Friday, splashing down off the coast of California, near San Diego. Here’s everything you need to know about the landing, including how to tune in. How did the Artemis get its name? The name Artemis is a throwback to the first NASA moon missions. Apollo 11 saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take giant leaps for mankind on the surface of the moon on July 20, …

It’s a low time for higher education, depending on where you look. In recent years, dozens of colleges and universities have closed their doors, and dozens more have merged in an attempt to survive. There are many factors that are leading to these closures, but it typically comes down to a lethal combination of increasing costs and lower enrollment. Smaller private schools are finding themselves in harm’s way, and it’s become worse over the past five years. Conversely, other schools are thriving, and becoming increasingly selective. Vanderbilt University, for instance, recently announced an acceptance rate of 2.8% out of a pool of nearly 49,000 applicants. That ac…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While active listings are rising year over year in most regional housing markets, a slight majority of markets are still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 46 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 46 months. …

I have spent the better part of a decade helping thousands of first-time founders raise their first round of outside capital, and evaluating thousands more for investment. In all of these data points, I found a pattern that explains every single VC round. In the last six months, I’ve seen this pattern play out more dramatically than ever before. Founders are failing to raise without ever really knowing why. I find myself bringing it up again and again to help folks who are raising. So I decided to write about it. Because every founder should know exactly where they fall, and plan accordingly. The only 3 types of rounds in venture capital There are thre…

We’re well past the point where “remote work” is a novel perk. In 2026, if a tech company isn’t offering some form of home-office flexibility, they’re basically recruiting from a time capsule. But as the novelty of the Zoom-from-the-couch era fades, a new frontier is emerging. The next evolution isn’t just about working from your home office, it’s about working from anywhere. We’re talking about companies that have decoupled productivity from time zones and borders. These “digital nomad” pioneers don’t care if you’re hitting your KPIs from a flat in London or a beach in Bali, as long as the work gets done. If you’re looking to upgrade your “out of office” …

“Same soulless vibes. Fewer fossil fuels.” So says the website for Mumumelon, a new project that made exact dupes of Lululemon staples like hoodies and yoga pants—but with renewable energy and a detailed plan to cut emissions. Inside a fake pop-up store in London in late March, a fake employee gave customers the pitch: “We stole Lululemon’s designs and made them less terrible for the environment.” “We’ve been campaigning on Lululemon for a few years now to push them to invest in the renewable energy transition and phase out fossil fuels from their supply chain,” says Ruth MacGilp, a climate campaigner at the advocacy group Action Speaks Louder. “We wanted t…

For years, premium credit cards competed on points, perks, and airport lounge access. Now, the battleground is shifting toward something less tangible but arguably more powerful: experiences. Chase Sapphire Reserve is leaning further into that strategy with its latest offering, a one-night-only “Dinner at the Opry with Ella Langley,” which will bring cardmembers directly onto the stage of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry on May 31. Timed to the release of Langley’s sophomore album, Dandelion, the event blends live music, dining, and behind-the-scenes access in a way that reflects how the brand is trying to position itself at the center of culture. The event is part…

More American workers are experimenting with artificial intelligence in their jobs, but skepticism is still widespread. New Gallup polling finds that while more employees are using AI frequently in their work, there’s been an uptick in alarm that new technologies will replace their jobs. Many workers who are not using AI say they prefer to work without it, have ethical oppositions to the technology or worry about data privacy. The poll, conducted in February, points to a divergence in how AI is reshaping American workplaces. Some find it to be a gamechanger for productivity and efficiency, while others are concerned about its potentially negative impacts. Social worker…

My father has a PhD in mechanical social engineering and, among many things, designed cooling systems for nuclear reactors. From him, I inherited a restless curiosity about how the world works and a deep respect for the laws of science. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the principles governing physical objects translate perfectly to business. Take Newton’s first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion—at least in a vacuum. What’s true in physics is true for companies. Those that stall are destined to fall behind. But the businesses that remain in constant motion? They succeed. In the agentic AI era, data is …

Issa Rae is a Hollywood success story. Her web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl launched her career in the early 2010s, leading to her HBO series Insecure and now her production company Hoorae Media. Through all her projects, Rae has been praised for her authentic portrayal of Black women’s lives—but at a recent panel, Rae said that the entertainment industry is no longer interested in celebrating diversity. Shifting tides in the film industry While speaking at TheWrap’s Creators x Hollywood Summit last Wednesday, April 8, Rae pointed out a troubling trend she’s seeing on the production side of Hollywood. “I’m seeing it. Just blatantly. Peopl…

AI is already transforming how organizations operate, compete, and create value, and adoption is accelerating across industries. Businesses that are experimenting with AI and learning how to move from initial ideas to deployment are building the infrastructure to deliver value both now and in the future. Those that are waiting—for the technology to mature, for conditions to stabilize, for someone else to figure it out first—risk finding that a competitor has upended their market before they’ve even begun adapting to this new era. Given the current chaos in global markets and geopolitics, the temptation to avoid change and pursue a defensive strategy is strong. But it …

“I would like to introduce our Principal Auctioneer for the Broad Arrow sale today, Lydia Fenet at the Amelia.” As I walk up the steps to the podium to take my place next to the auction reader, I look out at a packed room of over a thousand people sitting and standing around the room. 10, 9, 8. Adrenaline floods my body. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. 7, 6, 5. Shoulders back. Chin up. Eyes forward. I listen as the reader finishes the last minute sale announcement and gives a brief description of the first car we will be selling. 4, 3. As he is finishing the description I open the binder that holds all the auction information in front of me, glancing at th…

CoreWeave is having a very eventful week, and its stock price reflects it. Shares of the AI cloud-computing firm (Nasdaq: CRWV) are up more than 37% in five days following deals with Meta Platforms and Anthropic. On Thursday, April 9, CoreWeave announced a six-year agreement with social media giant Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram. CoreWeave will supply AI cloud capacity to Meta through December 2032. “The dedicated capacity will be deployed across multiple locations and will include some of the initial deployments of the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform,” CoreWeave stated in a release. “This distributed approach is designed to optimize performance,…

The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home had written about AI’s purported risk to humanity and traveled from Texas to San Francisco intending to kill Altman, authorities said Monday. Authorities allege 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama threw the incendiary device about 4 a.m. Friday, setting an exterior gate at Altman’s home alight before fleeing on foot, police said. Less than an hour later, Moreno-Gama allegedly went to OpenAI’s headquarters about 3 miles (4.83 kilometers) away and threatened to burn down the building. Moreno-Gama is opposed to artificial intelligence, writing about AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending …

From the outside, ambitious professionals look confident and in control. Promotions, leadership roles, packed calendars—they all signal someone who has it figured out. But many high achievers are quietly struggling with something else: they’ve stopped trusting their own instincts. Ambition trains you to listen outward. Performance reviews, promotions, praise, and metrics reward the ability to meet external expectations. Over time, that habit can drown out the internal signals that tell you when something feels aligned and when it does not. Rebuilding self-trust rarely happens in a single breakthrough moment. It happens gradually as you start recognizing the pa…

In case you didn’t hear, we just went back to the moon. NASA has been heavily promoting the Artemis II mission for months, which concluded on April 10 after its four astronauts splashed down off the coast of California. No doubt, this venture was an objectively awe-inducing feat. The space agency successfully demonstrated the most powerful rocket it’s ever built, the Space Transportation System, and tested Orion, its crew vehicle, with a crew for the first time. NASA’s astronauts also traveled farther into space than ever before, and humans saw the dark side of the lunar surface with their own eyes (another major first). But how excited did the rest of humanity ge…

At its factory in Illinois, Rivian will soon use more than 100 retired EV batteries in an on-site power system that will help it save money on electric bills. The electric automaker is one of the first customers of Redwood Materials’s new energy storage business, which takes old or discarded EV batteries—in this case, from Rivian’s own vehicles—and deploys them in a second life on the grid. By making it possible to charge when there’s excess energy available and the cost of electricity is low, the project “can generate significant cost savings that directly contributes to a reduction in the cost of our vehicles,” says Andrew Peterman, who runs Rivian’s advanced en…

Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date. Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court. “People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman. That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale. In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a …

For years, companies have assumed the internet was built for people. Websites were designed to attract human attention, explain, persuade, reassure, and eventually convert. Search engine optimization, user experience, digital merchandising, and checkout design all rested on the same basic premise: the user was a person sitting in front of a screen. That premise is beginning to crack. Not because people are disappearing, but because they are starting to delegate. More and more often, the first system reading your site, comparing your offer, interpreting your policies, or even initiating a purchase will not be a human being. It will be a software agent ac…

Did you know that December is spelled with an X? Neither did we—until one influencer’s viral video showed the pitfalls of relying on AI for answers. AI is growing less and less popular by the day. A recent Gallup survey found a 14% decrease in excitement among Gen Z about AI since 2025, with 48% of working Gen Zers saying that using artificial intelligence in the workforce isn’t worth the risk. As anti-AI sentiment grows, anti-AI creators are finding a new niche. That includes Husk, an influencer whose videos showing ChatGPT’s frequent mistakes have gone viral over and over again. Take Husk’s most recent video. Pretending to be studying for a test, he asked C…

Canva built its 265-million-person audience by being the easy-to-use, template-friendly design tool for everyone. And when generative AI arrived, it quickly integrated the technology. Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it’s building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it’s launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it’s announcing today. But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being “a design platform with AI tools” to becoming an “AI platform with design tools.” Connecting with Canva’s CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the …

Five years ago, tech angel investor Chris Adamo and a few friends jumped on a burgeoning trend in the digital asset world: they used a virtual real estate broker to buy 23 parcels of property in a metaverse called The Sandbox. He doesn’t remember exactly how much he spent, but it was around $200,000 for the whole group. The real estate, to be clear, consisted of pixelated parcels in “hip,” “trendy” virtual “neighborhoods,” an asset that crypto bros and Web3 enthusiasts like Adamo saw as the future of tech and digital investment. At one point, it ballooned tenfold in value. Adamo was far from alone. Across the four major metaverse platforms, property sales topped $500 mill…