Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary once declared that to succeed in business you must be willing to grind out 25 hour work days. He has since walked back on that idea, calling it, in his own words, “sheer stupidity.” In fact: “The worst advice I hear young founders talk about all the time is that they want to work 18 hours a day. How stupid is that?” O’Leary said in a video posted on his Instagram page last week. The eat-sleep-work lifestyle—also known as the “996” schedule first imported from China, which stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—has since gained momentum among Silicon Valley tech companies. Despite his previous declarations, O’L…

Comparing social media platforms to casinos and addictive drugs, lawyer Mark Lanier delivered opening statements Monday in a landmark trial in Los Angeles that seeks to hold Instagram owner Meta and Google’s YouTube responsible for harms to children who use their products. Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube face claims that their platforms addict children through deliberate design choices that keep kids glued to their screens. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums. Jurors got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remai…

Sunday night’s Super Bowl and Bad Bunny fell short of setting records for most watched U.S. broadcast and halftime show. Seattle’s 29-13 victory over New England averaged 124.9 million viewers on NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL+, according to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel rating system. That fell short of the 127.7 million U.S. viewers that tuned in for Philadelphia’s 40-22 victory over Kansas City last year on Fox. However, Super Bowl 60 is the most-watched program in NBC history. The network is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Bad Bunny’s halftime show averaged 128.2 million viewers from 8:15-8:30 p.m. Eastern. That would make it the fo…

U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands. The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday. The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000. The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth. But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new job…

This should come as a shock to very few people, but Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which typically needs very little reason to give away its doughnuts, is giving away free doughnuts today. This time, the free doughnut giveaway is in honor of Fat Tuesday 2026. But there’s a catch. Here’s what you need to know. What is Fat Tuesday? Today (Tuesday, February 17) is Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras. The holiday always falls on the final Tuesday before the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Lent observance period. Traditionally, Christians refrain from eating certain foods during Lent, particularly rich and fatty ones. As a…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to drastically downsize. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowski cited both layoffs and the employees leaving the company and not being replace…

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish fintech company Klarna, says the organization is set to employ drastically fewer people. And he says he shares his outlook on the workforce with another CEO: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Siemiatkowski made the comments on the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbings earlier this week, where the CEO didn’t deny that the company has been steadily shrinking. The CEO said that currently the company has about 3,000 employees. That’s down from 7,000 just four years ago. In another four, he says there will likely be less than 2,000—a reduction of one-third. Siemiatkowsk said employees leaving the company are not being replaced, and expla…

One week ago, a Savannah, Georgia, woman was killed during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pursuit. It’s not the first time in recent weeks that a bystander has been killed by ICE. However, this story—one involving a Black bystander—hasn’t taken off with the same ferocity as others that have flooded our feeds and torn at our collective heartstrings. In fact, many haven’t even heard about the recent incident. Dr. Linda Davis, a beloved 52-year-old mother of five, was struck by a truck driven by a man who was fleeing immigration officers. Davis taught kindergarten and first grade at Herman W. Hesse K-8 School in Savannah’s south-side suburbs, less than…

What do you envision when you think of meekness? You probably see a mousy doormat, someone sheepishly acquiescing to the will of the stronger. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” you might think that those wimps will hand it over without a whimper or word of objection to stronger, more ambitious people. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called meekness “craven baseness.” Indeed, one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions is “inclined to submit tamely to oppression or injury, easily imposed upon or cowed, timid.” Meekness, then, is a weakness. Why would you ever want to be meek? The same goes for docility, often …

There are a few odors from adolescence that are seared into the brains of most Americans who grew up after the 1980s: the aroma of freshly baked brick pizza in the school cafeteria, the acrid stink of a locker room, and the unmistakable scent of teen boys wearing an unforgivable amount of Axe body spray. The phenomenon of teens dousing themselves in Axe has become so ubiquitous since the brand’s founding in 1983 that over the past few years it’s inspired its own subgenre of memes (see this one and this one, for example). Now Axe has its sights set on a new generation of consumers with a redesigned spray mechanism for its signature product. To mark the occas…

OpenAI’s Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new models—GPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early February—as well as the launch of Codex’s app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access points—including the cloud, app, and command line—more than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company. Generating computer code has …

When the email pinged in my inbox, I didn’t even bother to open it immediately. I already knew what it was. One glance at the subject line told me everything. After enough time on the job hunt, you develop a sixth sense for HR language. The preview text—“Thank you for taking the time…”—said it all. It’s the standard soft intro to bad news: Your application was amazing . . . but not amazing enough. The blow softens once you’ve received a few of these. But the emotions that follow resemble the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. I ran the gamut of these feels when I got my latest rejection for a role that seemed p…

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block Inc, is not only laying off nearly half of the company’s workforce, but he wants investors to think he’s an AI-focused trailblazer for doing so. In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, Dorsey shared that Block’s workforce is shrinking from over 10,000 people to just below 6,000 people, with some employees entering consultation. Dorsey credits “intelligence tools” with motivating the change, explaining that these tools and a “significantly smaller team” will allow the company to be better and do more. Block owns fintech brands such as the Square point-of-sale system, Cash App, and Afterpay, along with the music streaming service Ti…

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…