Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” opened with $345 million in worldwide sales, according to studio estimates Sunday, notching the second-best global debut of the year and potentially putting James Cameron on course to set yet more blockbuster records. Sixteen years into the “Avatar” saga, Pandora is still abundant in box-office riches. “Fire and Ash,” the third film in Cameron’s science-fiction franchise, launched with $88 million domestically and $257 million internationally. The only film to open bigger in 2025 was “Zootopia 2” ($497.2 million over three days). In the coming weeks, “Fire and Ash” will have the significant benefit of the highly lucrative holiday moviegoing corrid…

It’s been a pretty wild year in the world of advertising and brand work. Amid broader industry shifts, there has been some incredible brand work created this year across many different platforms, film, experiences, and more. But as we bring 2025 to a close, I wanted to take a more targeted look at some of the best commercials of this year. I’ve tried to adhere to criteria that includes level of difficulty, creative inventiveness, risk, and sheer entertainment. Despite how much great work is out there, sadly, most advertising can be generously categorized as cultural wallpaper. But these select few pieces of brand weren’t a waste of time—they made me laugh, think…

Over the past five years, the remote work revolution has changed life as we know it for corporate folks like myself. And while I’m on the record singing the praises of working from home, I’d like to set the record straight: It’s not without its faults. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed my weekday afternoon naps and time away from co-workers. But I’ve also come to realize that before the pandemic, we were putting a little bit too much gas on working from home. Is WFH convenient? You bet your ass it is. Waking up and not having to get out of bed — or get in the shower or get dressed because I’m taking all my meetings with the camera off — is a lifestyle I’ve come to appr…

With its goofy block lettering and bright colors, the MetroCard feels like a relic, which it sort of is—an early 1990s design, complete with gradients and drop shadows, that’s managed to stick around long enough to become one of New York’s defining symbols. At a time when generic minimalism and the sheen of AI-generated graphics have taken over, its unmistakable graphics feel refreshing. And the fact that a 31-year-old fare payment system is still in circulation when most tech today becomes obsolete in a matter of months is a remarkable achievement. But the end is near: on December 31st, the MTA will stop selling MetroCards and completely phase them out on an imminent d…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s net worth surged to $749 billion late Friday after the Delaware Supreme Court reinstated Tesla stock options worth $139 billion that were voided last year, according to Forbes’ billionaires index. Musk’s 2018 pay package, once worth $56 billion, was restored by the Delaware Supreme Court on Friday, two years after a lower court struck down the compensation deal as “unfathomable.” The Supreme Court said that a 2024 ruling that rescinded the pay package had been improper and inequitable to Musk. Earlier this week, Musk became the first person ever to surpass $600 billion in net worth on the heels of reports that his aerospace startup SpaceX…

This year delivered whiplash: geopolitics, tariffs, and technology all shifting at once. And heading into 2026, the disruption isn’t easing up. Bob Safian distills hard-won lessons from his Rapid Response podcast this year on how to lead when the ground won’t stop moving—featuring standout moments from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela, Meta’s Clara Shih, LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman, Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson, and the NWSL’s Jessica Berman, with practical takeaways for turning uncertainty into advantage. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. According to our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up +0.2% year-over-year between November 2024 and November 2025. While that pace has decelerated over the past year—back in November 2024, the national year-over-year home price growth rate was +2.3% —it has ticked up slightly from the recent low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing m…

SoftBank Group is racing to close a $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end through an array of cash-raising schemes, including a sale of some investments, and could tap its undrawn margin loans borrowed against its valuable ownership in chip firm Arm Holdings, sources said. The “all-in” bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm’s position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank’s entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia, offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US stake, and slashed staff. Son has slowe…

As many families are preparing to gather for the holidays, influenza (flu) cases are spiking across the country. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), positive test results have reached the highest levels seen so far this season. ​The most frequently reported influenza virus this season is the influenza A H3N2 virus. Last week, Fast Company reported on a new mutated strain of influenza A H3N2, known as the subclade K flu variant, which emerged after multiple mutations. Here’s what you need to know. Recent data shows positive cases are spiking According to CDC data for the week ending December 13, 14.8% of …

You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule. Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when you’ve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because that’s been your routine for most of your working career. Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom…

In the world of the long-running kids show Cyberchase, Motherboard, a sort of digital queen and literal technocrat, is the beneficent but impaired leader of all of cyberspace. She is—we are to understand—a legitimate ruler, yet faces constant attacks from the odious Hacker, a green-skinned android who dresses like a vampire and whose only goal is to sow chaos and eventually take control of Motherboard’s realm, which we might describe as something akin to a metaverse, or ever-expanding digital world. Luckily, a trio of human kids named Inez, Mattie, and Jackie—a squad—visit cyberspace frequently, where they embark on missions to help protect the ever-embattled Motherboard…

December 15, 2025—the deadline for enrolling in a marketplace plan through the Affordable Care Act for 2026—came and went without an agreement on the federal subsidies that kept ACA plans more affordable for many Americans. Despite a last-ditch attempt in the House to extend ACA subsidies, with Congress adjourning for the year on December 19, it’s looking almost certain that Americans relying on ACA subsidies will face a steep increase in healthcare costs in 2026. As a gerontologist who studies the U.S. healthcare system, I’m aware that disagreements about healthcare in America have a long history. The main bone of contention is whether providing healthcare is the respon…

By the end of October, David, who works at a roughly 2,000-person finance firm in New York, already knew he’d be working during the holiday season this year. Usually at the office, he learned he’d at least get to work remotely between December 26 and January 1—with the way the financial calendar fell, it was inevitable that he couldn’t just disappear for clients (like institutional investors and family offices) during that time. He says the schedule doesn’t really bother him. “I’m not in a trench in the middle of a battlefield here. I’m not laying bricks,” he says. “It’s not terribly unrealistic work that they’re asking us to do.” Mainly, he’s expected to respond to em…

How should leaders prepare for AI’s accelerating impact on work and everyday life? AI scientist, entrepreneur, and Pioneers of AI podcast host Rana el Kaliouby shares her predictions for the year ahead—from physical AI entering the real world to what it means to onboard AI into your org chart. El Kaliouby cuts through today’s biggest AI headlines, bringing to light the insights that will matter most in the months to come. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business le…

Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets. Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it. Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting togeth…

One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for…

A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it. Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the “old” internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence. It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the int…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. The average price net of incentives of new-builds sold by Lennar—America’s second largest homebuilder—came in at $386,000 in Q3 2025. That’s down -10.2% from $430,000 in Q4 2024 and down -21.4% from $491,000 in Q3 2022. While last quarter Lennar acknowledged that it will no longer be as aggressive in prioritizing volume over margin going forward, the giant homebuilder said that doing so (i.e., volume > margin strategy) over the past few years helped it gain market share while some other builders were more conservative. “During the past three …

It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of these…

Santa keeps delivering for quantum computing investors this year. On Monday, shares of well-known quantum computing firms shot up by double digits, with D-Wave Quantum stock up almost 15% and Quantum Computing Inc. up 11%. Shares of IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing were likewise up roughly 10%. The exact catalyst spurring those increases is unclear. It may have initially been sparked in part by D-Wave’s Monday announcement that it would be attending the CES 2026 trade show next month. The Palo Alto-based company plans to showcase its “award-winning annealing quantum computing technology, hybrid quantum-classical solvers, and real-world customer use case…

We used to argue whether design was about aesthetics or about functionality. But in 2025, those conversations seemed downright quaint. Simpler debates for a simpler time. Now we’re wondering if craft can survive the age of AI, and if we’ll ever escape the politicization of every brand and object again. For the December episode of our podcast By Design, I discussed these trends and more with Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson. We were joined by some of our brightest friends in the industry who shared their biggest own moments in design for the year, including Paola Antonelli (senior curator at MoMA), Cliff Kuang (FC Design’s first editor and senior staff d…

Across the country, a growing sentiment suggests the university degree is an artifact of a bygone era, a depreciating asset in an economy obsessed with speed. A recent Gallup poll confirms this shift, revealing that Americans’ confidence in the value of a college education has plummeted to a 15-year low. Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the “skip college” mantra has evolved from a “hot take” to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot w…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss pill on Monday, giving the Danish drugmaker a leg up in the race to market a potent oral medication for shedding pounds as it looks to regain lost ground from rival Eli Lilly. The pill is 25 milligrams of semaglutide, the same active ingredient in injectable Wegovy and Ozempic, and will be sold under the brand name Wegovy. Novo already sells an oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, Rybelsus. The approval could help spur a turnaround for Novo after a rocky year of sliding shares, profit warnings and slowing sales of its injectable Wegovy amid intense competition from Lilly and pressure from c…