Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

For those who don’t remember what life on the internet looked like in 2023, here’s a refresher: girl dinner, the Roman Empire, and a TikTok algorithm painted purple from the McDonald’s Grimace Shake. The trend was simple, albeit strange: a user would film themselves trying out the purple McDonald’s beverage and then immediately cut to a horror-movie scene of their own faked death. The purple vanilla-berry-flavored milkshake was rolled out by the fast food chain in June of that year as a limited-edition menu item in honor of one of the chain’s mascots, Grimace. While the fake death trend garnered over 2.9 billion views on TikTok, and reportedly boosted sales by…

In a few weeks, Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce—around 8,000 employees out of the company’s workforce of 78,000. In a recent Q&A with employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg (not the AI clone version) shed some light on the reasons behind the downsizing. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg blamed the layoffs to data center and AI infrastructure spending. “We [basically] have two cost centers in the company,” Zuckerberg said, according to the Journal, pointing to raw processing power, like GPUs and chips, as well as data centers. “There’s [compute and infrastructure] and there’s people-oriented things, and if we’re investing more in one …

For years, genetic testing has been treated as something rare and exceptional—a highly specialized tool ordered only by geneticists and often reserved for the end of a long diagnostic journey. Not surprisingly, medicine has changed. Science and technology have advanced and patients’ expectations have evolved. And yet, the way genomic testing is used in practice has struggled to keep up. Exome and genome sequencing should no longer sit on a pedestal in healthcare. It should be used far more broadly as part of everyday clinical care. The insights encoded in our DNA are foundational to understanding human health, yet too often genomic testing is still viewed as a last …

It’s official: the robots are taking over. Taking over the internet, that is. Conspiracy theorists have long discussed the “dead internet” theory, which reasons that online spaces, once entirely populated and filled with content created by humans, have slowly become dominated by bots posing as people. The more extreme conspiracists allege that this transformation is deliberate, with governments and corporations using the bots to manipulate public perception. With the rise of AI since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the dead internet theory—or at least some version of it—has sounded more and more plausible. Now, according to a recent study, it’s closer to coming true. …

Since the massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, fans have been eagerly awaiting the next Peter Parker-centered film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Five years later, the fourth MCU Spider-Man film, subtitled Brand New Day, is finally coming to theaters—but a reveal in the screenplay’s first page has some fans abandoning the hype train. Director Destin Daniel Cretton shared the first three pages of Brand New Day with Entertainment Weekly, complete with annotations from himself, stars Zendaya and Tom Holland, and other department heads. The pages reveal that the story picks up nine months after the events of No Way Home. Spoiler alert: Peter Parker, for…

Spirit Airlines looks like it’s getting spirited away. The airline is preparing to shut down, after attempts to establish a $500 million bailout from the The President administration fell through, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Negotiations for the government lifeline had been underway for weeks as Spirit’s cash reserves dwindled, but investors have reportedly balked at the prospect of the federal government becoming a majority owner of the company. Despite reports saying that the company is prepping to cease operations, a company spokesperson declined to comment when asked by Fast Company, and said that “Spirit is operating as usual.” O…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported a Salmonella outbreak in more than a dozen states. Worse, the outbreak appears to be linked to a strain of the bacterium that may be resistant to antibiotics. Here’s what you need to know about the source of the outbreak, where its occuring, and what you can do about it. What’s happened? On April 23, the CDC posted an update regarding its ongoing investigation into a multistate outbreak of Salmonella infections. The outbreak is believed to be linked to backyard poultry, such as ducks and chickens. The first reported infection linked to the outbreak is believed to have occurred on February 2…

Raising Cane’s, the Louisiana-based chicken finger chain known for its tangy sauce, crinkle fries, and thick Texas toast, is continuing to expand. This May, Cane’s will open locations in seven states, including its first in one. The company recently told USA Today that the new openings will kick off on May 12 and continue through May 27 with new restaurants coming to California, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, and Ohio. Additionally, Arkansas will get its first-ever Raising Cane’s in the Jonesboro area. Two other locations — Oklahoma City and Lexington, Kentucky — will reopen, on May 4 and May 18, respectively, after being revamped. “We’re staying co…

AI is being touted as the future of weather forecasting—faster and more precise. But new research shows a major blind spot: it often fails at predicting extreme weather. Traditional physics-based models still do better. “They do perform well on a lot of tasks, but for very extreme events—that are the most important for society—they still struggle,” says Sebastian Engelke, a statistics professor at the University of Geneva and one of the authors of a new study in Science that pitted some of the leading AI weather models, including GraphCast and Pangu-Weather, against a database of recent extreme events. For record-breaking heat, like a heat wave in Siberia in early…

Artificial intelligence is permeating workplaces, changing the nature of jobs of every stripe. Teachers are using it to create lesson plans and grade papers. Marketing professionals are harnessing it to work a room and learn about the needs of potential clients. Product managers are asking AI to serve as an interpreter when technical conversations went over their heads in meetings. Some people who employ AI tools are concerned that widespread use of the technology could erode critical thinking skills, especially among children. They also caution that AI-assisted work needs to be checked carefully because the tools have been known to hallucinate and make mistakes. Here …

Elon Musk on Thursday sparred with an attorney for OpenAI during his third day of testimony in the contentious trial over the company’s pivot from nonprofit status to a for-profit venture valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. The trial centers on the 2015 birth of the ChatGPT maker as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk. It pits the world’s richest person against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit. Tempers have flared on both sides of the high-stakes trial, as the morning began with an existential discussion about the future of humanity — complete with r…

Change, whether personal or professional, can be challenging. But it can also create opportunities to make a meaningful impact. But navigating the uncertainty is tricky. Art Markman, a leading cognitive scientist and Fast Company contributor, joined Fast Company executive digital director Maia McCann in a recent conversation to share strategies on how to stay grounded, optimistic, and purposeful during times of change. Drawing on his expertise in well-being, Art offers tools to help you influence outcomes you care about and show up with clarity and confidence, no matter what the year brings. View the full article

With gas prices, energy bills, and grocery costs all rising, the affordability crisis is top of mind for most workers. But you can’t talk about that crisis without also talking about extreme wealth inequality, says Patricia Stottlemyer, policy lead for labor rights at Oxfam America. And just as affordability has worsened recently, so has the gap between regular workers and the rich, including company CEOs. In 2025, for example, the top 1,500 CEOs of the world’s largest corporations saw an 11% real-terms pay raise. The average global worker, on the other hand, saw their real wages increase by only 0.5%. That means those CEOs saw their pay increase 20 time…

AI is changing how directors and cinematographers work—but not the way you might think When people think of artificial intelligence in Hollywood, they might picture deepfakes, synthetic actors, or AI-generated scripts and video. Google’s Veo3, along with other tools like Pika Labs and Kling AI, made headlines for their photorealistic AI generated video clips (as did OpenAI’s Sora 2 before the company in March announced plans to shutter it). But for freelance filmmakers, the real shift is happening behind the scenes. For years, cinematographers and directors have had to wear many hats: artist, technician, project manager, negotiator. Now, AI is quietly taking over some …

Apple posted strong results for its quarterly earnings on Thursday, but investors’ attention is also focused on the upcoming CEO change and the tech firm’s artificial intelligence strategy. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced earlier this month he will be stepping down from the role, with Apple’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, assuming the role later this year. The January-March results announced Thursday reflect the continued momentum of iPhone sales. Cook said in a statement that it was the company’s best March quarter ever, with “double-digit growth across every geographic segment.” The company earned $29.58 billion, or $2.01 per share, in the January-March per…

For years, it was common for even the biggest tech companies to have annual capital expenditures, or capex, in the single- to low-double-digit-billion range. You might have heard a tech company say it planned to spend $9 billion, $15 billion, or even $25 billion on research, development, and other costs in the upcoming fiscal year. But lately, capital expenditures at the largest tech companies have been off the charts, with some companies now regularly forecasting single-year capex in the hundreds of billions. The driving factor for this is, of course, artificial intelligence (AI). Some of the biggest names in tech are throwing previously unthinkable sums b…

The new orthopedic wing at Sanford Health’s hospital campus in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has a unique patient-centric amenity that few other hospitals can offer. On the top two floors of the facility, which conducts surgeries and emergency services and connects to a nearby delivery ward, there is now a hotel. In largely rural South Dakota, where a trip to the hospital often means a drive halfway across the state, hospital patients now have the option to stay overnight ahead of a big procedure under the same roof as the hospital. “It’s much more convenient for patients to go down an elevator ride for eight floors and check in for surgery than commuting across town or …

Bringing home the Baconator is not as easy as it used to be, and it’s about to get even harder in cities around the country. Fast food giant Wendy’s is continuing its push to close hundreds of locations as it seeks to stabilize profits and shed underperforming restaurants. Nearly six months after the burger chain first announced the plan on an investor call, its U.S. footprint is decidedly smaller, with multiple states seeing net store declines in the double digits, according to a review of Wendy’s store locator tool. As of Friday, the tool showed 5,675 locations in the United States. That’s roughly 200 fewer locations than what it showed at the end of Sep…

In a general sense, workplace leaders are trained to focus on what can be seen and measured. They’re taught to pay close attention to employee performance, productivity, and efficiency—often without realizing that some of the most important aspects of work will never appear in any of these metrics. What too often goes unseen is how people experience their work. Whether they find meaning in what they do. Whether they feel connected to it and to the people around them. Whether their work aligns with who they are. To some, these may sound abstract or insignificant. They are not. They are core drivers of human well-being—and therefore of employee motivation and achievement.…

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t mince words in court this week while adjudicating the ongoing trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI in Oakland, California. Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, needed to stop being messy bitches. While she didn’t put it like that (she advised both men: “Control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom”), the underlying message was clear. The fact that the case even made it to court is indication enough of how strongly both men feel about one another. Social media name-calling is hardly necessary to make that plain. But the reason they’re so eager to throw digital barbs at each other stems from …

When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany. In that moment, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 became the fastest shoe in the world. Sabastian Sawe Sawe was the first person to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race, followed closely by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who finished with a time of 1:59.41. Fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set…