Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

If optimizing your social media privacy settings feels important but overwhelming, a company called Block Party may be able to help. Founder and CEO Tracy Chou has long been known for advocating for diversity in the tech industry. And like many diversity advocates, and women and people of color in technology, she’s experienced plenty of harassment online, along with outright stalking. She founded Block Party after realizing that tech platforms themselves didn’t make it particularly easy to optimize settings for privacy and security. The initial Block Party product focused on the platform then called Twitter, helping users easily filter out spam, harassment, and o…

Like most humans, I generally prefer to surround myself with people who like, value, and respect me. You know, it’s quite a nice and simple way to boost my self-esteem. And yet, after studying human behavior for many years, I am fully aware that the tendency to indulge in this self-enhancing habit is intellectually debilitating: while it feels nice to hang out with people who appreciate you, it is also a way to develop blind spots and ignore opportunities to get better, improve, and develop new skills and ideas. Montaigne warned of this in his Essays, cautioning against surrounding oneself with flattering mirrors that reflect only our vanity, not our flaws. Shakespeare…

Featuring Stan Adams, Public Policy Specialist, Wikimedia Foundation; Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties Director, ACLU of Northern California and Alissa Starzak, Deputy Chief Legal Officer and Global Head of Policy, Cloudflare. Moderated by Max Ufberg, Senior Editor, Fast Company. In an era of mass surveillance, mounting attacks to cybersecurity, the death of net neutrality, and geopolitics fragmenting the internet, it’s never been a more important time to fully understand what’s at stake regarding your digital rights and freedom. Join this panel of leaders at the forefront of securing a better and more open digital space for all. View the full article

The Girl Scouts have been sued by consumers over the alleged presence of “heavy metals” and pesticides in its popular Thin Mints and other cookies. A proposed class action lawsuit was filed on Monday night in federal court in the New York City borough of Brooklyn against the 113-year-old nonprofit and the cookies’ licensed producers, ABC Bakers and Ferrero USA’s Little Brownie Bakers. It cited a December 2024 study commissioned by GMO Science and Moms Across America that tested samples of 25 cookies from three U.S. states. The study said Girl Scout cookies contained at least four of five heavy metals – aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury – that can ha…

TikTok is shutting down TikTok Notes—wait, you didn’t even know it existed? Well, that explains a lot. TikTok Notes, the platform’s short-lived attempt to take on Instagram (just as Instagram Reels was built to mimic TikTok), is officially being retired. Launched in limited markets like Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year, the photo-sharing app let users post images with captions—simple enough, but apparently not compelling enough. Users are now being notified that TikTok Notes will shut down on May 8, with TikTok instead shifting focus to another ByteDance-owned platform: Lemon8. “We’re excited to bring the feedback from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we cont…

Featuring Logan Eggleston, Pro Athlete, LOVB Austin Volleyball; Rosie Spaulding, President, LOVB Pro and Stef Strack, Founder and CEO, Voice in Sport. Moderated by Tania Rahman, Social Media Director, Fast Company. Women’s sports have finally been receiving the recognition they deserve. The goal now is to make sure this moment isn’t just a trend, and to ensure women athletes achieve the equity that remains elusive. Join this panel of executives and athletes to understand the strategy behind making women’s sports not just a cultural force but a thriving ecosystem of sustainable businesses. View the full article

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. As someone deeply invested in sustainable mass transit and supply chain automation, I’m also invested in an idea that could change the world of freight transport for us all. The global supply chain is in flux. Even before new tariffs, the nearshoring trend in North America has created an urgent demand for more innovative and efficient freight solutions. However, despite automotive a…

MrBeast is currently the most-subscribed YouTuber in the world—but his biggest moneymaker isn’t content. It’s chocolate. The 26-year-old creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, owns the snack brand Feastables, which generated $251 million in sales and more than $20 million in profit last year, according to investor documents obtained by Bloomberg. By contrast, his main media business—including his blockbuster YouTube channel and the Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games—brought in similar revenue but lost nearly $80 million over the same period. With 372 million subscribers at the time of writing, MrBeast’s videos range from spending “100 hours i…

Max just got a new logo. Again. Two years after rebranding from HBO Max to just Max with new a bright blue-and-white logo, the Warner Bros Discovery-owned streaming service is making an update to its logo. This time, it’s swapping blue for a metallic black and white logo. According to Max, the color change is part of a larger refresh. Max says the standalone logo will be in the black-and-white color scheme, but an updated color palette, chosen to allow for flexibility of the logo in app and in marketing materials, will be unveiled in the coming months. Why Max updated its logo Max includes content from HBO and other Warner Bros Discovery brands, like Adult …

After watching videos of a Delta Air Lines jet catch fire upon landing and flip over on a Toronto runway, it’s fair to wonder how anyone could have survived. But aviation experts said it was not surprising that all 76 passengers and four crew walked away from Monday’s disaster, with 21 people suffering minor injuries and only one still hospitalized on Wednesday. It’s a credit, they said, to advances in plane design as well as a crew that flawlessly executed an evacuation plan. “When I first saw (footage of) that aircraft upside down at the airport, I was like: ‘How can that happen? And how can anybody survive that?’” Michael McCormick, an assistant professor and p…

I have spent my career watching companies make bold declarations about gender equality, only to see those promises fade when tested. Women are often spotlighted in recruitment campaigns but left behind in promotions, appointments, and development opportunities. Policies designed to level the playing field disappear without explanation, replaced with vague references to “merit,” “culture fit,” and the elusive “gravitas.” The 2025 U.N. International Women’s Day theme—For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment—is urgent. However, progress in gender equity is not accelerating; it is stalling. In recent months, executive orders have gutted diversity program…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. A year ago, our company made a bold move. We put up a million dollars in prize money for any of our team members—no matter their role—who came up with transformative ways of using AI to serve our clients. As a health marketing agency, we saw it as our version of the renowned XPRIZE, hoping that this initiative would truly spark meaningful change and inspire us to think bigger for our clients. …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Most of us have heard the phrase “supply chain disruption” a few times too many in recent years. An extreme weather event or material shortage in one corner of the earth can ripple through thousands of global businesses, causing major delays. As the CEO of a company that builds data centers for some of the biggest technology providers in the world, it’s a concept I’m all too familiar with. It’s …

Struggling to get enough spinach in your diet? Rather than rustling up a salad or green smoothie, one TikToker has a rather unusual hack to ensure she hits her daily greens goal. “I call it dinosaur time,” TikTok user @sahmthingsup said in a video posted last month, wherein she stands over the sink and stuffs handfuls of raw spinach into her mouth. While it may not be the most appetizing way to consume the leafy greens, the food “hack” has already racked up more than one million views. “For added enrichment, put on a dinosaur documentary,” one user commented. Another added: “My life changed when I realized I could do this with any food I should be getting…

As organizations grapple with rapid developments in technology and policy while also balancing shifting market conditions and financial realities, having a deep bench of leadership talent is crucial. However, a recent survey from TalentLMS, found that 45% of managers say their companies aren’t doing enough to develop future leaders. One of the key issues is that companies are using a narrow scope in offering leadership development opportunities, says Nikhil Arora, CEO of learning technology company Epignosis, the parent company of TalentLMS. “A lot of companies kind of limit the leadership development to the top 1%, leaving behind the remaining 99%,” he says. Aror…

The death of downtown is now a familiar refrain. Central business districts (CBDs) in cities around the world—once bustling centers of office work—were hit hard by the pandemic and the shift to remote work, leading many to predict they would never fully recover. But instead of demise, downtowns are being reinvented. And Tokyo is leading the way. Traditional downtown business districts in cities around the world were defined and dominated by vertical towers where legions of white-collar professionals and support staff were stacked in isolated office buildings. The world’s largest metropolitan area is pioneering a new model where the city itself increasingly takes o…

This time, the giant schnauzer went the full Monty. After coming close in the last two years, Monty the giant schnauzer won the top prize at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show Tuesday night, leaving handler and co-owner Katie Bernardin almost too emotional to speak. “He always tries so hard, and we’re just proud of him,” she told the crowd at Madison Square Garden. The spirited schnauzer bested six other finalists to become the first of his breed tapped as Westminster’s best in show, the most prestigious prize in the U.S. dog show world. The dog won the huge American Kennel Club championship in December, and he’d been a Westminster twice before. A standout because o…

Curiosity is one of the most consequential forces in human history. Every scientific breakthrough, technological leap, and cultural advance begins not with knowledge, but the desire to know. At its core, curiosity drives us to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know, a cognitive itch triggered by uncertainty and resolved through learning and the pursuit of meaning. Curiosity as an evolutionary advantage Early humans who explored their environments, experimented with tools, and learned from novel stimuli were more likely to secure resources, avoid threats, and pass on their genes. As a result, curiosity became embedded in our biology, reinforced …

If there’s one thing businesses have in abundance, it’s data—in some cases, far more of it than they know what to do with. AI can turn daunting mountains of information into knowledge that’s accessible to staffers across the organization, regardless of their technical chops. These honorees are helping their customers unlock better understanding of data to do everything from supercharging sales teams to choosing the right music to license. Baseten For giving companies big and small a head start on inference Anyone building an AI application has access to powerful open-weight LLMs such as DeepSeek-R1. But the fact that the models are freely available doesn’t mean they’re…

While many AI companies are betting their products can be useful to a broad segment of businesses, a startup called Emanate is taking the opposite approach, building highly targeted tools designed for complex sales transactions in the industrial materials sector. Founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin says the somewhat esoteric market, which includes manufacturers, distributors, and service providers working with materials from steel building materials to metal piping, has intricate sales processes involving generating quotes for bespoke orders, connecting existing customers with goods they may need, and proactively finding new customers. The industrial materials sector,…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. PFAS contamination is everywhere: clothing, household products, even the water we drink. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), aka “forever chemicals,” are engineered to last, making them commonplace in manufacturing but devastating to human health and the environment. While regulators scramble to set new limits, traditional water treatment methods aren’t keeping up. For industry, th…