Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The way we consume culture has fractured into millions of pieces and the far corners of the internet. But media companies are finding creative ways to keep capturing market share. For publishing imprint Bloom Books, that means capitalizing on TikTok’s rise by turning #BookTok’s viral hits into paperback bestsellers. For Webtoon, it’s doubling down on a dynamic fast-metabolism format with five-minute-long “episodes” that bring comic books to life. The satiric newspaper The Onion is channeling its best quality—humor—into a new revenue stream by opening its own ad agency, while the New York Times is cranking out vertical video reels meant to be viewed on smartphones. Live…

Traditional economic development tends to focus on investments made and jobs created. For this year’s group of Most Innovative Companies—or in many cases, foundations or governments, in this case—the key performance indicator isn’t dollars spent, but connections made. Growth comes not from directing resources, but finding a better way to nurture what you already have. Governments found creative ways to unleash the potential of their residents, workers, and civil servants. The state of New Mexico, for example, made a first-in-the-nation move to subsidize childcare for all, giving working parents and families a leg up. In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act offe…

The world of public relations has always been about making a splash. And in an age of more and more media clutter, breakthrough ideas have never been more important. To create that can’t-miss-it buzz, this year’s most innovative PR firms paired an A-list Hollywood actor with an A-list Hollywood director, staged a surprise pop-event in a major urban transportation hub, enlisted some of the biggest stars from the booming world of women’s sports, and employed some creative grammar to stir up social media chatter. Giant Spoon created a campaign for the emerging electric vehicle brand Lucid that was essentially a short action film, directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, A…

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought…

Postpartum depression is often framed as a private struggle that unfolds at home or in the doctor’s office. But for millions of working parents, its effects also show up quietly at work—through missed deadlines, sudden disengagement, or a colleague who no longer seems like themselves. Too often, these changes are misunderstood as performance issues rather than signs of a common and treatable mental health condition. To better understand what employers, managers, and coworkers often miss—and how workplaces can respond more thoughtfully—I spoke with Andrea Clark, deputy CEO of Postpartum Support International, a global nonprofit focused on supporting families and raising a…

When people choose their cofounder, it’s rarely scientific. They’re guided by trust, and trust is easiest to find in familiar places: former coworkers, college classmates, close friends, people who already sit in your orbit. While starting a company is chaotic enough without bringing strangers into the mix, I wanted to understand whether this instinct toward familiarity actually comes with a cost. Turns out it does. Having worked with hundreds of early-stage startups as founders and investors, including at Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, and NFX, we wanted to test whether the instincts founders use to choose partners actually hold up in the data. We surveyed nearly 350 U.S. te…

If you have a direct report who identifies as neurodivergent, you may wonder how best to be their manager. Often, when we manage others, we imagine how we would react to the things we plan to ask, or the feedback we plan to give, and the work environment we aim to create. That strategy is not always effective in general, and it is likely to fail spectacularly when engaging with neurodivergent colleagues. Here are a few things to consider when supervising a neurodivergent employee. Engage with curiosity Start by being curious. Meet with your supervisee and get their permission to ask questions so that you know best how to enable them to succeed. Trust your emplo…

Polymarket is updating the rules of its platform to crack down on insider trading as the prediction market giant looks to curb scrutiny over market manipulation. Announced Monday, the updated rules outline three distinct categories of insider trading that will be prohibited on the platform: trading on stolen confidential information (based on confidential info that violates a preexisting obligation), trading on illegal tips (based on info that was passed down illegally), and trading by those who can influence the outcome. “Markets thrive on clarity,” Neal Kumar, chief legal officer of Polymarket, said in a press release. “These rule enhancements make our expectati…

Several hundred non-tenured full-time faculty members at New York University are on strike after the school failed to reach a tentative contract agreement with Contract Faculty United-United Auto Workers. Nearly 75% of the union’s more than 900 full-time NYU contract faculty—who teach across the university’s various schools—voted to authorize the strike in February. On Monday morning, a deal seemed possible, with CFU-UAW extending its 8 a.m. strike deadline by three hours after bargaining through the university’s spring break last week. By midday, union members and supporters were on the picket line outside NYU’s John A. Paulson Center in lower Manhattan. The stri…

Elon Musk runs an auto company. He oversees an aerospace company. And he controls a social media outlet. Now he wants to add chipmaker to his resume. The multi-hyphenate billionaire announced plans over the weekend to build a chip manufacturing factory in Austin, Texas, which will produce chips for SpaceX and xAI, which recently merged. Musk, at a presentation Saturday, said the project, dubbed Terafab, will be the “most epic chip building exercise in history by far.” Musk has been talking about Terafab for a while, but the event on Saturday marked the official start to the project. While xAI and other artificial intelligence companies have largely depended on TSM…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On Friday, Trumark Homes—which has been majority owned by Japan-based Daiwa House since 2020—announced that it has struck a deal to acquire a Seattle metro-based homebuilder JK Monarch. The deal is the latest in a recent string of U.S. homebuilder acquisitions by Japanese firms. Exactly five weeks ago today (February 13), Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry announced that it had agreed to acquire Tri Pointe Homes—a giant public homebuilder ranked No. 715 on the Fortune 1000—for $4.5 billion. Then on February 23, Stanley Martin Homes—which has been owned by Japa…

As return-to-office mandates tighten, many workers are reckoning what life in a cubicle looks like. If it’s up to the Swiss furniture and design firm Vitra, your next cubicle might not look much like a cubicle at all. Vitra partnered with German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic to create Scout, a family of minimalist office furniture built to adapt to the flexible ways people work today. Launched on March 19, Scout is comprised of five pieces that range in sizes, offering stationary and mobile workspaces with customizable options for workplaces and schools. Konstantin Grcic The tables feature trapezoidal desks that have metal tubular frames. Attachments tha…

If you pick up plastic trash from a beach, you’re helping protect marine wildlife from harm. And every little piece—from a plastic bottle cap to food wrappers—matters, because even small amounts of this trash can be deadly to animals like sea turtles and seabirds. A new calculator from Ocean Conservancy can now quantify that impact. If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested. “We hope that people really see that beach cleanups matter,” says Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy’s…

Market research can be a slow, fragmented, and difficult process, often involving tedious internet searches, questionable data sources, and time-consuming manual synthesis. This makes it a great candidate for some assistance from AI. What’s more, an update to a popular feature on ChatGPT has made it even better at doing this kind of work. Imagine that you have a potential business idea but still need to validate how viable it actually is, identify primary competitors in your market, and develop an ideal customer persona. Instead of spending hours collating data, explains Dan McCarthy, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, you can use Deep Re…

It’s another bad day for gold and silver. Traders in precious metals are seeing both gold and silver plummet significantly as the week kicks off, with gold down nearly 7% and silver down 8% over the past 24 hours. Worse, gold has now fallen nearly 20% since its all-time high of over $5,586 in January. Silver is down even more, falling more than 44% since its all-time high earlier this year of over $121. Here’s what you need to know. The ‘safe haven’ trade is absent Silver and especially gold are generally considered “safe haven” assets—assets investors turn to when economic uncertainty abounds, and they want to park their money in a valuable that isn’t likely …

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. When Valerie Oswalt became CEO of breakfast and snack products company Kodiak in November 2022, she inherited a fast-growing business with beloved products, dedicated employees, and an outdoorsy vibe, befitting its Park City, Utah, headquarters. She also walked into a company that needed to …