Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Total active U.S. housing inventory for sale recently fell by 42,133 homes, from 871,509 in December 2024 to 829,376 in January 2025, according to the latest Realtor.com data. Historically, national active inventory usually declines during this seasonal month-over-month window, with the average decline since 2017 being -69,646 between December and January. The fact that inventory is rising year-over-year, combined with January’s smallest inventory decline for the month since Realtor.com began publishing data in summer 2016, strongly suggests that…

Japanese automaker Nissan’s chief executive, Makoto Uchida, is stepping down after the company reported dismal financial results. Nissan Motor Corp. said in a statement Tuesday that Ivan Espinosa, who is now the company’s chief planning officer, will take Uchida’s place, effective April 1. Espinosa, who joined Nissan in 2003, has spent much of his Nissan career in Mexico and Southeast Asia, overseeing product planning including the drive toward electric vehicles. “I sincerely believe that Nissan has so much more potential than what we’re seeing today,” Espinosa told reporters, while stressing that he needs time to come up with details for a turnaround. He stressed his…

Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning recently surveyed leaders and L&D professionals about what they’re looking for in a leadership development program. At the top of the list? Scalability. One of my passions—and one of the reasons my company developed our own learning platform—is expanding access to leadership development, so it’s exciting to see companies recognizing how important scalability is. At the same time; however, I know that making scalability work at your organization can be a tall order. For a long time, scalability and quality have seemed at odds in leadership development. An organization could spend its budget on highly effective, b…

How brands reach consumers is always evolving. And at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW this past weekend, executives from Duolingo, NBCUniversal, and Creators Corp. discussed how they’re not only holding their consumers’s attention, but finding ways to embed their brands into their daily lives, primarily through branded entertainment. NBCUniversal: Find Ways to Engage Fans within an Experience When John Jelley, SVP of product and user experience at Peacock and global streaming for NBCUniversal, thinks about branded entertainment, he thinks about fandoms. From Love Island to The Traitors to Saturday Night Live, NBCUniversal has a wide array of IP with deep fando…

Google is rapidly expanding its AI search capabilities, as reflected in the announcements it made Tuesday at its Google I/O developer conference. The search giant announced the general availability of AI Mode, its chatbot-format AI search product; some changes to its AI Overviews search results; and its plans to add new visual and agentic search features this summer. Google’s biggest announcement in the realm of search was the general availability of its AI Mode, a chatbot-style search interface that allows users to enter a back-and-forth with the underlying large language model to zero in on a complete and satisfying answer. “AI Mode is really our most powerful vers…

Daters: It might be time to spring clean your dating app profile. More than 50% of young Americans have gone on a date with someone who looked different from their profile photos, according to a new survey from dating app Hily. That’s led 54% of Gen Z and 62% of millennial daters to either end a date early or decline a second one, Hily found after surveying 3,700 dating app users earlier this month. “For a variety of reasons, quite a few people don’t regularly update their profile pics, some not even when their looks change,” the company wrote in an accompanying blog post. “Women tend to be afraid of being judged for their appearance, while men feel like the …

Otter, the AI-powered meeting assistant and transcription service, is introducing a new AI agent capable of answering spoken questions from meeting participants in real time. The AI can also perform tasks like scheduling follow-up meetings and assigning action items to the meeting record stored on Otter’s platform. When responding to questions, it can draw on both publicly available information for quick research queries and knowledge gained from previous company meetings. The AI will only provide answers based on meeting records that all current participants have permission to view, ensuring confidential information remains protected. [Image: Otter]The tool can also be c…

The torches designed for Milano Cortina 2026, next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Italy, were made in service of the flame. Named Essential, the reusable, ultra-minimalist torch has a flared, open-top design meant to show viewers how the flame is generated because “what’s important isn’t the torch, but the flame,” Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti tells Fast Company. The design is meant to showcase the flame in motion. “The open-top design is crucial to how the flame comes to life,” explains Ratti, who designed the torch with his eponymous firm, Studio Carlo Ratti Associati. The torches were developed by Eni and Versalis, both official supp…

If you have been on the job market recently, you know how challenging it can be. Lots of tech companies, for example, are pulling back on hiring. Federal workers are being laid off by the thousands. And some types of jobs are simply not as available as they once were. Particularly in short supply are those prized white-collar positions paying $94,000 or more. So, any serious job seeker must sharpen their skills to land a job. You can increase the likelihood of a successful search by avoiding the following six big job search mistakes: Mistake No. 1: Applying for too many jobs The first mistake is applying for too many jobs and, as a result, not giving enough tim…

Twenty-four-hour customer support with zero hold time, infinite personalization, customized care, and behavior-based response are all aspects of the customer experience that will be expected sooner rather than later from every one of your customers. All of this is becoming reality, thanks to agentic artificial intelligence. Agentic AI is the most advanced form of artificial intelligence to date. It works autonomously, can understand natural language, sets goals and plans workflows, and makes decisions in real time based on the data it collects and examines. It learns from results and then teaches itself a new way to satisfy the needs of those that interact with it, i…

Disney might tout its rides and character IP when it looks to lure people to its theme parks around the world, but once visitors get there, the draw is an escape from reality. Fans call it the “Disney Bubble”: The day-to-day world melts away and you’re immersed in an environment that is carefully crafted (and controlled) by Disney. The Disney Bubble is designed to let vacationers to take one step away from the real world for the length of their stay. Distractions are minimized. You don’t even need to pull out your wallet. Paying for things like a souvenir or a snack can be done with just the tap of your phone or Magic Band. The Bubble is why many guests prefer t…

I like to say that I spend most of my life negotiating—and if you consider your own work and life, you just might feel the same. My career has been full of back-and-forth: I sat across tables negotiating agreements for Christie’s for over two decades as Global Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships; I stand on stages around the world as a charity auctioneer, negotiating prices up to maximize fundraising; and I founded a talent agency that requires me to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of my clients. To top it all off, I’m a mom of three kids. Over the years, I have listened to many people unknowingly sink their own negotiations with a mistake as simple as…

Intel‘s promised $28 billion chip fabrication plants in Ohio are facing further delays, with the first factory in New Albany expected to not be completed until 2030, local media outlet The Columbus Dispatch reported on Friday. The first factory will begin operations sometime shortly thereafter in either 2030 or 2031, the report said, citing the chipmaker. Shares of the company, which originally scheduled to begin chipmaking in Ohio factories in 2025, were up more than 5%. Intel has been cutting capital expenses after its expensive bid to become a contract chip manufacturer for other companies, in a move to restore its lost glory, strained its balance sheet. …

One of the more frustrating classes I took in college in the 1980s was a computer science course on data structures and algorithms. In that class, we learned about a variety of approaches to solving key problems in programming. For example, we learned several different ways to take a list of numbers given in an arbitrary order and to sort that list from smallest to largest. These approaches differed in their efficiency. What frustrated me about the class wasn’t the algorithms themselves—they were interesting. But we were never taught how anyone ever came up with those different approaches. What in the world would have gotten someone to even think of those things? …

Several channels owned by Paramount Global, including CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and MTV, could go dark on YouTube TV this week if a contract renewal cannot be reached between the two companies. YouTube TV, a subsidiary of Google, announced in a statement that it is working hard to reach a fair agreement that allows it to keep Paramount channels without raising prices for subscribers. It had not yet been successful in “good-faith” negotiations. What will happen if a new contract isn’t reached? After February 13, all Paramount content, including CBS and CBS Sports, will be removed from YouTube TV. Subscribers will also not be able to access previous re…

Severance is a set design wonderland. From a massive mirrored corporate monolith in New Jersey to a classical train station in upstate New York, the show’s distinctive visual language—which has captivated audiences and critics alike—relies on actual places that have been carefully chosen to mess with your head. These aren’t just random pretty buildings. They’re psychological weapons that connect the dots in the same way the writers weave the tapestry of the tale. Severance follows a group of humans that go through a procedure to separate their (outie) real lives from their (innie) corporate bees working for a mysterious industrial conglomerate call Lumon, effectively…

If you’ve been noticing that cobalt-hued water bottles have started to pop up everywhere you’re not alone. The water has recently made an appearance on shelves at major retailers including Whole Foods and 7-Eleven, starred in viral social media videos created by fitness influencer Ashton Hall, adorned on tables at the Golden Globes, and beginning this week, will star in a fresh new advertising campaign featuring WNBA point guard Skylar Diggins. All of these marketing efforts represent a more expansive pitch by Saratoga Spring Water that the brand’s premium-priced water isn’t just for fine dining– which has been the brand’s core focus for the past several years — it’s …

The commercial starts with an actor sitting in front of a TV, remote in hand. Suddenly the world around her changes, and she changes, too, as makeup artists transform her from a couch potato to a Victorian-era lady to a skeleton buried in dirt. The time-lapse filming looks like AI, but it’s exactly the opposite. In fact, the 90-second commercial—shot for BritBox’s first ever brand campaign—is the product of a single, continuous shot that took 14 hours, 45 minutes, and 31 seconds, and was filmed with 11 different sets, at one frame per second using a precision motion control unit. The British streaming service is aiming to woo potential subscribers with its attention to de…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Will native-AI operating systems run our computers in the near future? Samantha, the AI that Theodore falls in love with in the 2013 movie Her is actually an OS. That’s how he meets her: He buys a new OS called OS1 (“it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness”) and “she” is its persona. Samantha becomes his intuitive and personalized companion to all his digital stuff, from email to video games. ChatGPT set off the generative AI boom in part because consumers (not just aca…

When a hurricane or tornado starts to form, your local weather forecasters can quickly pull up maps tracking its movement and showing where it’s headed. But have you ever wondered where they get all that information? The forecasts can seem effortless, but behind the scenes, a vast network of satellites, airplanes, radar, computer models and weather analysts are providing access to the latest data—and warnings when necessary. This data comes from analysts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA, and its National Weather Service. Atmospheric scientists Christine Wiedinmyer and Kari Bowen, who is a former National Weather Service forecas…

It’s tough enough bringing the first major redesign of a commercial jetliner to fruition—especially when it looks more like something out of The X-Files than a travel brochure. So, to streamline that journey, JetZero—the first commercial blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft—is teaming with Delta as an eventual buyer to troubleshoot operation and design issues from the ground up. “Our biggest challenge is, `How do you bring an aircraft to market as quickly as possible so that you can have the most impact for your customer?’” says CEO Tom O’Leary, who cofounded JetZero with CTO Mark Page. “We don’t want to zig-zag our way to entry into service. We want to take the cleanest,…

The trope of the starving, broke artist has long maintained a place in the public imagination, even as it has morphed into idealized notions of “‘hustle” or “grindset.” “It’s cool to romanticize [that lifestyle] for a little bit and use it as part of your motivation,” says L.A.-based rising musician Gidi, “but at a certain point we gotta be able to see the fruits of our labor.” For many artists and songwriters, the fruits are there in the form of royalties—they’re just exceedingly difficult to harvest. In the labyrinthine world of the music industry, royalty collection is particularly complex. There are hundreds of music streaming platforms operating in hundreds of c…

Patricia Grabarek and Katina Sawyer are cofounders of Workr Beeing, where they help clients create thriving workplace environments. They are both industrial/organizational psychologists. Patricia has a background in consulting and internal roles, having led people analytics and talent management initiatives for more than 60 companies. Katina is also an associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona, where she focuses her research on workplace wellbeing. What’s the big idea? Achieving a culture of wellness at work goes way beyond a steps challenge or mindfulness program. Leaders need to demonstrate vulnerability about their own stru…