Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Since Patrick Star first posed it to Squidward Tentacles, the internet hasn’t been able to get the question, “Is mayonnaise an instrument?” out of its collective head. Luckily, experts have finally stepped in to give us an answer. Those experts include Hellmann’s, the world’s biggest mayo brand, and researchers at Northumbria University, led by Dr. Rachael Durkin, its Head of Global Music Technologies, who employed fields like acoustics, musicology, and organology—the study of musical instruments—to put the question to rest. Their inquiry takes inspiration from one of SpongeBob SquarePants’s most beloved early episodes, “Band Geeks.” In a much-memed scene, curmudg…

Yesterday, shares of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) dropped nearly 8% in a single trading session, ending the day at $547.54 per share. Today, the stock price has continued to fall, down about 2.5% in early-morning trading. At its current price of around $533 per share, it has declined more than 32% since META shares reached an all-time high of over $796 per share last August. But why has Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seen its stock fortunes reversed so profoundly since last summer? There are three primary factors at play. Meta loses landmark social media addiction trial The most immediate factor affecting META stock is lik…

Compliance comes for every industry. Healthcare has HIPAA. Retail had the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Now it’s defense industrial base (DIB). With the rollout of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), the Department of War (DOW)—and Katie Arrington’s advocacy through her former role as DOW chief information officer—are forcing a generational shift in how the defense supply chain protects sensitive data. CMMC isn’t mere guidance. It’s a contractual line in the sand that won’t stop with mega defense contractors. CMMC covers the small and midsize businesses across the U.S. that keep the nation’s economy moving and its security intact…

Top performers don’t leave things to chance. In business, they rely on advisors to help them make better decisions and get results faster. The same idea works for fitness, too. Many executives already have the discipline to show up at the gym. What often separates consistent progress from plateaus is strategy, not effort. Personal training provides structure, accountability, and expert insight that help turn hard work into measurable outcomes. If you’re used to improving performance at work, this approach should sound familiar. It’s about using expertise to get better results, more efficiently. THE POWER OF A PERSONAL PLAN There’s no shortage of workout pla…

Austria’s governing coalition on Friday announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a string of other countries in drawing up restrictions for young people. Alexander Pröll, the official in Chancellor Christian Stocker’s office responsible for digitization, said that draft legislation will be drawn up by the end of June. He said that “technically modern methods” of age verification will be used that allow users to verify their age while respecting their privacy. It wasn’t immediately clear when the plan to introduce a minimum age, which will need parliamentary approval, might take effect. Australia in 2024 took the lead, becoming the first co…

It’s no secret that children and adolescents have a lot more eyes on them these days thanks to everything from social media to cameras in everyone’s pockets. This experience (along with encouragement from brands such as Disney) has created space for young people to mimic adults, embracing cosmetics and anti-aging creams. Now, Italy’s consumer protection regulator says it is looking into the marketing strategies of some of the main contributors to this phenomenon: beauty companies. The country’s Competition Authority (AGCM) has launched two investigations into Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for allegedly failing to clearly indicate that their products are not…

Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, has proposed a delay to the state’s landmark 2019 climate law, saying its goals would be too costly and could worsen already-expensive utility bills. But a coalition of climate, labor, and community groups counters that there are serious costs to not meeting the law’s climate goals—like more expensive energy bills, lost jobs, and health impacts caused by pollution. Delaying the law would cost New Yorkers nearly $9,000 on their energy bills per household over five years, due to the loss of billions of dollars in energy credits or rebates, according to an analysis from NY Renews. The proposed rollbacks would mean roughly 1…

If you only skim the headlines lately, you’d believe “conscious consumerism” is in full retreat, backpedaling to obscurity. ESG has become a political flashpoint. Corporate purpose feels diluted. DEI has been rebranded, softened, or even shelved altogether. Brands, wary of backlash, are pulling back from impact language. And yet, consumers didn’t get the memo. According to our own 2026 Conscious Consumer Report, conducted with our partners Ipsos and Engage for Good, 40% of North American purchases are now influenced by social and environmental considerations, which is up from 38% in last year’s report. That growth struck even during inflation, heightened price sen…

The Senate early Friday morning approved Homeland Security funds to pay Transportation Security Administration agents and most other agencies, but not the immigration enforcement operations at the heart of the budget impasse that has jammed airports, disrupted travel and imposed financial hardship on workers. The deal, which the Senate approved unanimously without a roll call, next goes to the House, which is expected to consider it Friday. “We can get at least a lot of the government opened up again and then we’ll go from there,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. “Obviously, we’ll still have some work ahead of us.” With pressure mounting to resolve the 42…

With some of the largest and most influential tech giants planning to go public this year, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the mega IPO. Stock listings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX could all potentially happen in 2026, and it is the latter that may make its market debut first. Here’s the latest on the potential initial public offering from Elon Musk’s space-tech company: When is SpaceX’s IPO? For some time, investors have expected, or at least speculated, that Elon Musk’s rocket and space technology company, SpaceX, would go public sometime in 2026. And it looks like that may finally be happening. Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street J…

Designers love intention. Architects draw immaculate plans; curators craft pristine galleries; developers imagine carefully choreographed public experiences. But once the general population shows up, those spaces tend to change. Sometimes there’s an instinct among designers to fight against it; it’s hard to let go of an aesthetic goal. But—more often than not—the public makes spaces and designs better. It’s the people, not solely the place, who spark true imagination and inevitably shape its character. It’s the people who have the power to turn a design into something more welcoming and relevant, and push designers to think outside the box in creativity and problem-solvi…

You’ve spent years building a robust professional network. You’ve cultivated relationships with peers, mentors, and industry leaders. So when you signal that you’re exploring new opportunities, you expect your network to perform. Yet too often, promising conversations dissolve into silence. Warm introductions never materialize. Emails go unanswered. This isn’t a reflection of your professional standing. It’s a design problem: you’re making it too hard for people to help you. The fix is straightforward. Make it easy. Here are three ways to do so. Ask To Write to Their Contact Directly When you reach out to a contact seeking an introduction to a decision-maker, a…

As part of a strategic move to optimize its store footprint, Noodles & Company closed 33 company-owned restaurants in 2025. In January, the chain said it would close dozens more stores this year. However, despite the shrinking restaurant count, sales have grown. The fast-casual eatery held its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call on Wednesday, March 25. It reported that comparable store sales increased 6.6% in the final quarter of 2025. Sales growth and traffic are also up as of early 2026. Following the strong earnings report, shares of Noodles & Company (Nasdaq: NDLS) soared over 50% on Thursday. The stock is up almost 60% year to …

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we get underway, a little self-promotion: Apple’s 50th anniversary is on April 1. As the big day approached, I realized that many people present at the company’s creation were still very much with us. So I interviewed 23 of them for an oral history, “How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History of its Earliest Years.” It’s chock-full of great tales as told by everyone from cofounder Steve Wozniak to Liza Loop, the first Apple user. Hearing these pioneers reminisce, I felt like I had been there, too—and so will you, I think. Here’s the article. When OpenAI launched its Sora app last September, the…

Alex Balazs has spent more than two decades inside Intuit, starting as an engineer working on early versions of QuickBooks Online, when moving financial workflows to the internet still felt experimental. Now, as CTO, he is helping lead a more radical shift: turning financial software into systems that can think and act on a user’s behalf. “This combines the speed and scale of AI with human judgment and accountability,” he tells Fast Company. For decades, financial software has functioned as a ledger, categorizing transactions and generating reports about what has already happened. That model is beginning to break. Advances in AI are pushing the category toward real-time …

Timothée Chalamet drew widespread condemnation when he implied that opera is a dying artform, and said that “no one cares” about the medium anymore. It was a dumb thing to say. And it’s also wrong. Opera, like most performing arts, is still recovering from the pandemic. But the industry as a whole is actually growing–dramatically. Globally, opera is worth $3.4 billion, and is expected to grow to $5.33 billion over the next few years. First-time attendance has more than tripled since 2021, as more young people head to the opera house. And opera’s resurgence is part of a bigger trend; in multiple ways and across age groups and formats, people are turnin…

In 1966, Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, articulated what would become one of the most influential ideas in the history of business strategy: the experience curve. Its origins date back to T. P. Wright’s original 1936 paper, “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes.” Wright discovered a relationship between the cumulative production of a physical good and the costs associated with producing it. The breakthrough was that you could predict your future cost structure in a way competitors couldn’t. In 1966, BCG did a major study for a semiconductor firm and made a similar discovery. As Martin Reeves describes it, they found “that a company’s uni…

I’m standing in a showroom at the new General Motors design headquarters outside of Detroit resisting the urge to reach out and touch something. In front of me, there’s a Corvette CX, a one-of-one experimental sports car that the automaker has meticulously handcrafted to look both silky smooth and fast as hell. As I crouch down to see just how low this low-riding car would drive, the roof of the Corvette CX lifts up in front of me and opens like the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter jet. The robotic precision of the sculpted body opening up is pure spectacle atop the shock-and-awe of the car itself. GM designed this all-electric “hypercar” to be action-movie-read…

Visual truth is going down in flames, thanks to new generative AI models that produce synthetic media that looks indistinguishable from reality. But a team of university researchers has figured out a hardware fix that just might save us. Engineers at ETH Zurich have designed a working prototype of a camera that physically stamps a cryptographic seal of authenticity onto every photo or video right at the image sensor (electronic chip) that captures each photon from the actual world. “Trust in digital content is eroding. We wanted to create a technology that gives people a way to verify whether something is genuine,” co-developer Felix Franke explained in a press release. …

In a greenfield industrial park in rural Aiken County, South Carolina, Meta is building a new $800 million data center that’s much like any of the other hyperscale data centers giant tech companies are scrambling to construct. Set on 300 acres with two massive data halls making up most of its 715,000 square feet of buildings, it’s the kind of gargantuan facility that has become the de facto built form of the race to harness the lucrative power of artificial intelligence. But past the sprawling data hall buildings, a comparably modest administration building has a unique design feature. Instead of the concrete and steel used in the data halls and countless other data cen…

The answer to America’s submarine bottleneck, the U.S. Navy has decided, lies as much in software as it does in steel. A new multibillion-dollar facility in Cherokee, Alabama, aims to harness AI and robotics to build submarine components faster and more reliably. The automated “factory of the future” will produce parts for the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, both central to the U.S. fleet. It will cost $2.4 billion to develop. “This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base,” said John C. Phelan, secretary of the Navy, in a stat…

With Social Security on track to go broke in less than seven years, a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is proposing a solution: Cap Social Security payouts to $100,000 a year for couples, as part of an overall plan to save it from insolvency. (That’s $50,000 for a single retiree.) The renewed spotlight on Social Security follows a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the main trust funds responsible for paying benefits, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, could be insolvent by as early as 2033. By law, that would automatically trigger a massive 24% cut in benefits. On top of the higher cost …