Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Any avid reader undoubtedly recognizes him: the sleek, inquisitive bird frozen inside an orange oval that’s become Penguin Random House’s distinctive logo. With its new brand refresh, Penguin Random House UK is setting that iconic penguin free. The brand just unveiled a delightful series of hand-drawn illustrations, named the “Playful Penguins,” which show the penguin jumping, strutting, dancing, and doing a whole lot of reading. The illustrations will show up everywhere across the Penguin Random House’s global markets, from seasonal campaigns to social initiatives and point-of-sale displays—and they’re designed to bring some added joy and movement to the brand as it appr…

If 2024 was the Year of AI, 2025 became the Year of AI Slop. In the race to maximize all of its potential, we came to view AI results as a finished product. But as Balaji Srinivasan points out, AI is intended to function middle-to-middle; humans, by contrast, are end-to-end. By ceding it all to AI, outputs suffered; we suffered. Both people and machines settled for less than what was possible. Generic, hollow, clean, and devoid of subjective taste or judgement. Master of summary but without significant depth. Yet capable of complex analysis and able to perform tasks or generate high volume outputs with unprecedented ease and speed. This is the reality of AI. …

Few media brands scream “straight” quite like Playboy. Since the 1950s, the men’s lifestyle magazine has been best known for its photos of nude and scantily clad women (aka Playmates)—and, of course, for its iconic bunny mascot. But those who’ve been paying attention, Playboy has quietly undergone an editorial transformation. Since November, the magazine has relaunched its print edition (previously halted in 2020), started a Substack newsletter blending archival material with original writing, and introduced new Playmates to the world. It’s all been under the advice of Phillip Picardi, who was announced on March 11 as Playboy’s new chief brand officer and editor-in-ch…

Fancy a chauffeur? Uber is courting the well-heeled with a new ride option that will see it extend its reach from a taxi alternative to offering a more exclusive, limousine-style service. Uber announced Thursday it will launch a chauffeur ride option—Uber Elite—that will offer a “luxury ride experience” targeting executives and other frequent travelers. Uber Elite will become the rideshare operator’s most expensive option, and will be offered on an invite-only basis for current Uber Black and Uber for Business clients in San Francisco and Los Angeles, followed soon by New York. Uber is banking on a market for “a more elevated experience,” though the accompanying c…

Here is a number worth sitting with: 295%. That’s how much U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT surged in a single day last month, after OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense that its rival Anthropic had publicly refused to sign. In the same 24-hour window, Claude’s downloads jumped 51%. By that evening, Anthropic’s app had climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, leapfrogging 20 apps in under a week. One values-driven decision. One weekend. A measurable transfer of market share. Most of the coverage framed this as a political story. It isn’t. Or at least, not only. It’s also a brand loyalty story. And it tells us something important about the category …

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. On March 9, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO of Bluesky. She will become the social networking platform’s chief innovation officer, while Toni Schneider, a venture capitalist and former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic, joins Bluesky as interim CEO. (I may be the last person left who also associates Schneider with Oddpost, an impressive browser-based email client he co-created way back before Gmail existed.) Graber explained her decision as stemming in part from a desire to turn the CEO role over to someone who can help scale up the platform. From November 2024 to January 2025, as Elon Musk’s role…

College basketball is like a comet. It burns at the center of the national sports world for exactly three weeks, and then largely disappears until the next year. During this brief window American sports fans become obsessed with figuring out who is going to win March Madness games, often involving teams they’ve never watched play and know nothing about. The old adage is that the more college basketball you watch, the worse your NCAA Tournament bracket will be. But in the information age, you can gain an edge. If you know where to look and how to parse the information, you can find all the data you need to make educated calls on your tournament bracket. Here are se…

Usually, all-nighters are for college students and people worried about losing their jobs if they don’t deliver. And if there’s one thing that Ryan Coogler—writer, director, and producer of Sinners—has demonstrated over his career, it’s that he delivers. Yet on this February afternoon—a day before his blood-soaked Southern Gothic blockbuster would become the most Oscar-nominated project in cinema history—he’s sitting across from me in a knit monochrome tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses, looking rather sleepy. “My bad, bro,” he tells me after briefly losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. “I just pulled an all-nighter trying to get a draft in.” …

The more you use artificial intelligence, the less you fear it. At first, it’s easy to be intimidated by what it can do. The deeper you engage with it, the more the tool reveals its limits and, more importantly, the irreplaceable value of human judgment. I’ve worked with AI models and tools for more than a decade. From early machine learning applications in data analytics to the generative systems reshaping workflows today, I’m comfortable with the technology. Yet I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve felt the anxiety. I’ve lost sleep thinking about the pace of change, and what that might mean for the future. Like most parents, I worry about my child’s career pro…

People who live and work in Washington state don’t currently pay any income tax. But in a few years, a small group of residents will be subject to one: Washington lawmakers recently passed a bill that would impose a 9.9% tax on income earned above $1 million, which goes into effect on January 1, 2028. The so-called millionaires tax could raise up to $4 billion annually for the state, revenue that Governor Bob Ferguson has said could go toward free breakfast and lunch for students, and to working families through a tax credit. (Ferguson has yet to sign the bill, which landed on his desk March 13, but has pledged to.) The tax is part of a wave of bills that lawmaker…

The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It’s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth’s warming builds. Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 110-degree Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) reading in the Arizona desert on Thursday that smashed the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S. On Thursday, sites in Arizona and south…

On the one hand, the fact that Walmart passed $1 trillion in market cap is notable, but not especially surprising. The company has long been the largest company in the world, measured by revenue. Almost everyone is familiar with the small five-and-dime store that started in one of the most rural towns in America and grew up to become the biggest retailer in the world. On paper, this looks like just another milestone in a 64-year-old success story. But a closer look at how Walmart just hit a market cap reserved almost exclusively for tech giants reveals how the company has changed, even in just the past three years. For the past six decades, Walmart was the king of…

A surge of affordable used EVs is about to hit the market—at exactly the same time as drivers are looking to avoid high gas prices. Around 300,000 EV leases are set to expire this year, driven by a leasing boom that started around three years ago, when leasing offered the widest range of models eligible for federal tax credits. A wave of hybrid leases is also expiring this year. At the same time, there are fewer used gas cars on the market than usual because of slow sales in 2023 and 2024. Used EV sales are already strong, even as the rest of the EV market is struggling. Right now, buying an electric car can be a better deal than a similar used gas vehicle. At $20…

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought…

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…

We at Fast Company spend all year, every year, researching and assessing companies. When it comes time to identify the Most Innovative Companies in the World, there are four key factors we consider: •Innovation. Did the company create something truly original? •Impact. Did this innovation have a measurable impact on the company and its industry? •Timeliness. Did the innovation happen in the past 12 months? Or, if it’s older, did it bear fruit during this time frame? •Relevance. Does the innovation we’re highlighting connect to larger issues facing industry or society? No company clears the bar unless it meets those criteria. From there, there are p…

When a new song attributed to country singer Blaze Foley, “Together,” appeared on his Spotify profile last year, something didn’t seem right. For starters, Foley had been dead for more than two decades, and the cover art featured AI artwork of a man who wasn’t Foley, and the song wasn’t uploaded by Foley’s longtime distributor. Fake tracks have appeared on various artist profiles, including easy-listening act The Sweet Enoughs, and Australian bands Alpha Wolf and Thy Art Is Murder. Smaller artists are not safe either, with musician Catherine Brennan taking to TikTok saying “in the past two weeks I’ve had two albums released under my name that are not mine.” Spoti…

For the first time in 36 years, the old-school Adidas trefoil logo will appear at the World Cup. The vintage Adidas logo shows three leaf-shaped foils with three parallel horizontal lines that cut through the bottom of the shapes. It previously appeared on Adidas World Cup kits until it was replaced by the brand’s triangular three-bars logo in the 1990s. Now, for the 2026 World Cup, the trefoil logo is making a comeback, appearing on the right chest of away jerseys for 25 countries, including Japan, Mexico, and Ukraine. Bringing the old logo back is a nostalgia play. Sam Handy, general manager of football for Adidas, said in a statement that the German sportsw…

Meta must—quite literally—pay for endangering children across its platforms. A New Mexico jury has found Meta liable for misleading the public, exposing children to sexual exploitation, and fostering adverse mental health. Meta must pay $375 million in civil penalties for about 75,000 violations at the maximum penalty of $5,000 each. This decision marks the first time a U.S. state has successfully defeated a big tech company at trial. “The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in response to the verdict. “Meta exec…

The influential AI researcher François Chollet has long argued that the field measures intelligence incorrectly, that popular benchmarks reward a model’s ability to memorize vast amounts of data rather than navigate novel situations and learn new skills. Only recently, with the rise of autonomous AI agents, have companies begun to take that critique seriously. On Tuesday, the ARC Prize Foundation, which Chollet founded with Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, released a new and more difficult version of its benchmark. The test, called ARC-AGI-3, may offer the clearest measurement yet of how close today’s AI agents are to human-level intelligence. It consists of more than a t…

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most. Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions,…

Plane comfort is important yet notoriously hard to achieve. But now one airline is set to offer a cozier way to fly that won’t break the bank: extendable couches for economy passengers. On Tuesday, United Airlines announced the new, more comfortable seating arrangement — a set of economy seats that transform into a couch during long-haul flights. The offer is the first of its kind for any North American airline. The new seating arrangement, which was built from a patent held by Air New Zealand, a United partner, will be called United Relax Row. The seats will be located between United Economy and United Premium Plus®. The airline will offer up to 12 Relax Rox section…

Few sectors of the economy show the growing divide between the haves and have-nots more than the airline industry, which is increasingly catering to high-income fliers in an effort to squeeze as much revenue per available seat mile as possible. United Airlines, which just announced newly designed economy seats you can lie flat and sleep on, found a clever way to appeal to everyone by bringing the couch to coach. This week, the airline announced what it calls “United Relax Row,” a row of three seats that transform into a single lie-flat space. The seats will begin appearing on United aircrafts in 2027. Reaction online to the airline’s announcement was joyous. “Uni…

Below, coauthors Blythe Harris and Mallory May share five key insights from their new book, Daily Creative: The 5-Minute Habit to Rewire Your Brain. Harris is an artist and entrepreneur, and for many years was the cofounder and chief creative officer of Stella & Dot. Today, she runs Daily Creative with her partner, May, where they focus on creativity as a daily wellness practice—not an artistic achievement. What’s the big idea? Creativity is a natural human capacity that grows stronger with use. When we treat creativity as a small daily practice rather than a high-stakes performance, it becomes a powerful tool for well-being, flexibility, and feeling more a…

For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a distant memory. In reality, the SARS‑CoV‑2 coronavirus is still spreading widely across the globe and continues to evolve into new variants. Sometimes these variants are no more dangerous than the previous ones. Yet each newly discovered variant also has the potential to be more harmful than the last, which is why health organizations worldwide monitor emerging variants. Currently, health officials are tracking a new Covid-19 variant called BA.3.2, also known as “Cicada.” Here’s what you need to know about it. What is BA.3.2 ‘Cicada’? BA.3.2 “Cicada” is an offshoot of a COVID-19 variant that has been circ…