Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

There’s a scene in Office Space where Peter sits across from two consultants during a company downsizing. They ask him, “What would you say you do here?” He hesitates, smirks, and admits he only works about 15 minutes a week. The rest of the time, he’s pretending. It was comedy in 1999. It’s confession now. That question has come back to us. For years, we filled our calendars, stayed visible, and kept the machine moving. Our worth was measured in hours, output, and presence. It had to be. Humans were the system, and the system required us to keep it running. We didn’t question it because that was how things got done. AI has changed that. It can now do many…

When entrepreneurs list their principal reasons for launching a company, small business owners often cite being their own boss, flexibility in setting their working hours, and turning a commercial concept into reality as their main motivations. Now, new data identifies another incentive that may convince future entrepreneurs to take the plunge. According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average self-employed person earns significantly more income during their career than people who work for someone else. However, the report’s findings also note the widely varying levels of income among small business owners, and the length of time u…

As it faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging it helps facilitate child sexual exploitation, online gaming platform Roblox has unveiled a new age verification system. That system, however, could open it up a different sort of criticism. The popular app, which has roughly 151 million users, announced last week that it plans to require a facial age check for all users who utilize the Roblox chat system. User verification can be accomplished by either submitting a government ID or by submitting a selfie, which AI will examine to estimate the age of the user. The verification will begin rolling out in early December in select markets (which do not include the U.S.…

More children are cashing in their Make-A-Wish requests to meet their favorite content creators, with creator wishes more than doubling in the past decade. Make-A-Wish Foundation has been granting life-changing wishes for children with a critical illness since 1980. Now, alongside A-Listers and sports stars, YouTubers and TikTokers are also flooding requests, Axios reported. Requests to meet content creators make up 32% of the wishes granted within the entertainment industry, per Axios, the second largest source of requests behind the music industry. Several of the creators say they’ve been granting wishes for years and more than 50 creators and influencers …

As a parent, shopping for holiday gifts for your kids can be a dilemma. Of course you want to surprise the little ones with exciting presents, but you also know that most flashy toys won’t hold their attention for very long. They’ll likely lose interest in them within a few days and you’ll be stuck with plastic toy cluttering up their rooms, destined for the donation bin. In addition to being a waste of money, it’s terrible for the planet. What if you could surprise them with something that’s both beautiful and practical? Here’s some ideas for gifts that they’ll be able to use for years. A purse of their own State, $60 At some point, your child will nee…

As I said in previous articles, executives like to say they’re “integrating AI.” But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation. They bolt it onto existing systems without realizing that each automation hides a layer of invisible human work, and a growing set of unseen risks. AI may be transforming productivity, but it’s also changing the very nature of labor, accountability, and even trust inside organizations. The future of work won’t just be about humans and machines collaborating: It will be about managing the invisible partnerships that emerge when machines start working alongside us . . . and sometimes, behind our backs. The ill…

At 3:20 a.m. on January 8, Steve Gibson and his wife were jolted awake by a phone call: the Eaton fire was approaching their home in Altadena, California, and they had to evacuate. “We left in about 15 minutes,” Gibson says. “So we only took our passports, our insurance papers, three pairs of underwear, and our little dog, Cantinflas.” They thought that they’d be able to come back within a few hours. But they soon learned that their house—and their entire block—had been destroyed. They spent the next few weeks moving from short-term rental to short-term rental, and finally moved into an apartment, though they knew that insurance would only cover the cost temporar…

After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other. Brynn Putnam “When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us,” Putnam says. “There wa…

Today’s job market is more ruthless than ever, leaving many desperately clinging to their roles amid mass layoffs and side-eyeing the competition. In such environments, a rival colleague or workplace nemesis may make themselves known. Watching a smug colleague get called out for a mistake in a meeting or blundering a promotion is often deeply satisfying (even if we may not admit it). Many know the German name for this impulse, schadenfreude: pleasure derived by another’s misfortune. But another, more work-related term that has emerged recently is fail watching: a coping strategy born from today’s challenging job market as a way to make us feel better about our o…

Below, Ben Rein shares five key insights from his new book, Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection. Ben is an award-winning neuroscientist who has spent a decade studying the biology of social interaction. He is the chief science officer of the Mind Science Foundation, an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, and a clinical assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo. He also teaches neuroscience to an audience of more than 1 million social media followers. What’s the big idea? Loneliness is a problem. Many of us feel this, and all of us are seeing it affect society. But why is isolation so harmful? Why are virtual interactions a poor substit…

When work was drying up for freelance writer Megan Carnegie, she found herself compulsively hopping between apps and social media. “LinkedIn, WhatsApp, emails—and it was just terrible for my focus,” she says. “I was anxious about getting work.” On a whim, Carnegie (who’s also contributed to Fast Company) popped into a store selling secondhand computer equipment and bought an old Nokia burner phone. During the workday, she would use the burner for calls, and in the evening, switch back to her smartphone. With no access to apps and one fewer way to access the internet, her urgency and anxiety dissolved. “I just loved the quiet,” she says. The effects of social media…

The phrase quiet quitting has been cast as a generational rebellion, a disengagement crisis, and a leadership failure, all rolled into one. The narrative suggests that half of your workforce has decided to coast, collecting a paycheck while doing the bare minimum. According to new global research from Culture Amp, which analyzed the experience of 3.3 million employees worldwide, fewer than 2% fit into the definition of quiet quitting—that is, employees who lack motivation to go above and beyond but still plan to stay with their company. That finding challenges the viral narrative, suggesting that what’s happening inside organizations is more nuanced than a mass wi…

In his new book Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff pulls back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd reality of building one of the most recognizable consumer tech brands of the last decade. The following excerpt captures one of the book’s most pivotal moments: the high-stakes, borderline-reckless gamble to secure the name “Ring.com,” a decision that nearly emptied the company’s bank account, tested the patience of his investors, and set the stage for a brand that would soon reshape home security. eBay.com. Half.com. Cars.com. Shop.com. Toys.com. And yes, Nest.com. So many great four-letter domain na…

Media personalities and online influencers who sow social division for a living, blame the rise of assassination culture on Antifa and MAGA. Meanwhile, tech CEOs gin up fears of an AI apocalypse. But they’re both smokescreens hiding a bigger problem. Algorithms decide what we see, and in trying to win their approval, we’re changing how we behave. Increasingly, that behavior is violent. The radicalization of young men on social networks isn’t new. But modern algorithms are accelerating it. Before Facebook and Twitter (X) switched from displaying the latest post from one of your friends at the top of your feed with crazy, outrageous posts from people you don’t know…

When I launched my first business in my twenties, I thought success meant doing everything alone. I believed that if I worked hard enough, read every business book, and put in the hours, I’d eventually figure it all out. What I quickly realized, however, is that you don’t find the most valuable growth strategy in your balance sheet. You find it in your network. As the founder of Boston Business Women, I’ve watched thousands of women start and scale companies over the last decade. In 2024, women started 49% of all new businesses in the U.S., up from just 29% five years earlier. And while that growth is impressive, the gap between potential and access still looms large.…

Chris was frustrated. He’d used Artificial Intelligence (AI) extensively in college. Now at his first job, he saw very few of his colleagues ever experimenting with it. At first, Chris tried bringing up AI conversationally. He mentioned creating a meal schedule, as well as planning a cool weekend trip itinerary. But when he suggested to his manager how they might want to incorporate AI into their workflow, he felt rebuffed. Chris isn’t alone. As the first group of highly experienced AI users is starting work, they have experience with AI. However, they lack the credibility and subject matter expertise to transform workflows. Championing change management initiativ…

You’re probably winding down from work and getting ready for a few days at home with your family. But anybody with caregiving responsibility knows that the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks will not be relaxing. Since the United States does not have a federal policy that gives workers paid time off after giving birth, having a medical procedure, or to care for a loved one, many will cram this labor into their precious holiday time. Many of us have a colleague who will come back to work exhausted after spending time with a dying parent, having taken advantage of the time off from work to figure out hospice and funeral arrangements. Or one who will be caring for a sibl…

A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold. The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II. She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belo…

I keep coming up against a logical fallacy in strategy that I feel compelled to address. The logic holds that when a company has a shareholder-unfriendly component of its portfolio—e.g. the business in question is cyclical, or it is low-growth or low margin—the company should diversify to make that business less-shareholder unfriendly. I take on the fallacy in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece entitled Diversification Can’t Disappear a Strategy Problem: It Just Creates a Different Problem. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The argument The usual motivator of this argument is cyclicality: We have a cyclical business, an…

Only a week after experiencing a dreaded “death cross,” and subsequently seeing its value fall to less than $81,000, Bitcoin is showing some signs of recovering. On Monday, BTC’s price topped $89,000, and as of early Tuesday, are hovering around $87,500. To be clear, the slump is far from over—the coin saw its price top $124,000 just last month—and no one can predict what will happen next, but it’s a clear upswing in momentum. All told, when Bitcoin bottomed out at $81,000, it had fallen around 35% off its high. There were several reasons for the selloff, including outflows from large institutional investors and broader economic uncertainty, among other thin…

Apple said on Monday it is cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts, noting that only a small number of roles will be impacted by the layoffs. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles. The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day. Staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective customers were also affected, Bloomberg said. One of the …

European and Asian shares mostly gained on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied on hopes the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates soon. The futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.1%. Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% lower to 23,216.76 and the CAC 40 in Paris added 0.1% to 7,965.77. Britain’s FTSE 100 likewise gained 0.1%, to 9,542.55. In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 picked up 0.1% to 48,659.52 as a plunge in technology giant SoftBank’s shares weighed on the market. It fell 10.3% on concerns that returns from its heavy investments in OpenAI may be threatened by the next generation Gemini artificial intelligence model that Google launched…