Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

On Tuesday, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek announced he will step down from his leadership role after nearly two decades. Ek will serve as the company’s executive chairman and two former co-presidents — Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström — will share the role as co-CEOs. “Over the last few years, I’ve turned over a large part of the day-to-day management and strategic direction of Spotify to Alex and Gustav — who have shaped the company from our earliest days and are now more than ready to guide our next phase,” Ek said in a news release. Ek continued, “This change simply matches titles to how we already operate. In my role as Executive Chairman, I will focus…

Working in tech, I learned that technology alone doesn’t spark transformation. The people do. And people approach new technologies in wildly different ways. To be successful, companies need to adapt to that line of thinking, just like companies expect their teammates to adapt to transformative technologies, like AI. 3 TYPES OF AI ADOPTERS When we rolled out a custom-built company GPT to our 14,000 teammates several years ago, we saw three clear groups emerge. First, there was the “jump-in-with-both-feet” crowd. These are the early adopters who treat anything new like a shiny toy. Next were the skeptics who wondered how much of an impact AI would have on their d…

It can be tempting for business leaders to overly rely on data to drive their decision-making. But so often that approach can sacrifice the human connection that’s needed between leaders and their employees and customers. At Fast Company’s annual Impact Council meeting last week, Elyse Cohen, chief impact officer of the Selena Gomez-founded beauty brand Rare Beauty; and David Ko, CEO of mental health and sleep assistance platform Calm, took to the stage to discuss why leading like a human is so important, particularly at a time of striking technological advancement. Data-driven human connection Although Calm leverages AI, the company predominantly uses those capabilit…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists have an economic model called the Zillow Market Heat Index, designed to assess the competitiveness of housing markets nationwide. This model evaluates factors like home price fluctuations, inventory levels, days on market, and buyer demand to produce a score that indicates whether a market is hot (benefiting sellers) or cool (benefiting buyers). A higher score indicates a hotter metro-level housing market where sellers have more power. A lower score indicates a colder metro-level housing market where buyers have more power. Acco…

Shares in America’s publicly traded movie theater chains surged yesterday, the first day of trading after the Memorial Day holiday. It’s a holiday weekend that saw moviegoers flock to theaters in droves, snapping up tickets and leading to the best Memorial Day weekend box office in history. Here’s what you need to know about the Memorial Day box office and its impact on shares in movie theater companies. Memorial Day box office was the best on record Movies generated a record $326 million at the Memorial Day box office this weekend, a period that ran from Friday, May 23, to Monday, May 26. That four-day haul record was largely fueled by two films. The first was…

A new ad from the Coca-Cola Co. opens with a shot of a typewriter clacking out Stephen King’s The Shining. The viewer follows a passage being written in an old-timey typeface until there’s a reference to a bottle of Coke. Suddenly, the type appears as the cola company’s script logo. The ad is part of a new campaign called “Classic” running in Spain and the U.K., in which Coca-Cola highlights instances when its brand name appears in literature by rendering them in the books’ original first-edition typefaces. The passages are printed in black, and references to either “Coke” or “Coca-Cola” in passages from King’s The Shining, J. G. Ballard’s Extreme Metaphors, and V. S.…

Starting today, if you call an Uber in Austin you can match with a self-driving Waymo vehicle. The launch in the Texas capital is part of an expanded partnership between the two tech companies. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are already available on the Uber platform in Phoenix, and the companies plan to launch next in Atlanta. “With Waymo’s technology and Uber’s proven platform, we’re excited to introduce our customers to a future of transportation that is increasingly electric and autonomous,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. Austin riders who request an UberX, Uber Green, Uber Comfort or Uber Comfort Electric can be matched with a Waymo all-e…

You’re already juggling competing deadlines, back-to-back meetings, and strategic priorities. Then the Slack message arrives: “Hey, can you just take care of this?” It’s not in your job description. It’s not aligned with your goals. And it’s not the first time. Whether it’s managing logistics, picking up someone else’s project, or being asked to take notes again—many workers are routinely handed tasks that fall outside their role. Often, it’s framed as being a “team player.” But over time, these extra asks can add up to chronic overwork, blurred boundaries, and a stalled career trajectory. Handling these situations well isn’t about being difficult—it’s about being…

Most people know Henry Ford as the founder of the Ford Motor Co. and creator of the trailblazing Ford Model T. But fewer are likely to be familiar with his side occupation as a hotelier. In 1931, Ford Motor Co.’s headquarters in Detroit was connected to other major cities by the now-defunct Ford Airport, an airline service for which Ford himself provided the necessary land and main investment. Ford realized that many of the travelers and business partners who flew in to the Dearborn airport would want somewhere convenient to stay after their long journeys. The thought led Ford to build one of the country’s first airport hotels. [Photo: Isaac Maiselman Photography]…

Ever wonder why the sound of rain makes you instantly drowsy, but a ticking clock drives you up the wall? That’s because not all noise soothes the brain in the same way. Sleep sounds might seem like just background buzz, but they’re carefully engineered to allow your brain to let go. Behind every babbling brook or rainforest storm track is an intricate design meant to quiet the mind, block out distractions, and nudge you toward sleep. As more people rely on sleep sounds to wind down, the industry behind them has surged, which is evidence of just how common this nightly ritual has become. Mediation and mindfulness app Headspace, says 51% of listeners use its sleep con…

The productivity numbers don’t lie. Or do they? Most companies have now rolled out AI tools enterprise-wide. Licenses have been purchased. Trainings have been scheduled. Slack channels have been flooded with prompts. And yet, when leadership asks about the ROI, the room goes quiet. This is not a new story. In 1987, economist Robert Solow looked at the data after years of massive corporate investment in personal computers and found something baffling: zero statistically significant improvement in productivity. Companies had bought the technology. They just had not changed how they worked. This became known as the productivity paradox, and it is playing out again ri…

Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, he’s ready to record this week’s episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedia’s midtown Manhattan studio. The topic on this July afternoon, as usual, is artificial intelligence. One of Zitron’s guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, “Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times?” Zitron’s answer—“No!”—comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex. It would have been st…

Design industry leaders trust artificial intelligence less than they did a year ago, and many see the world as an increasingly uncertain place. These are a few of the most striking takeaways from the 2025 State of Design & Make report from the design and engineering software maker Autodesk. This third annual design industry outlook is based on surveys and interviews with 5,594 industry leaders, futurists, and experts across industries including architecture, engineering, construction, and operations, design and manufacturing, and media and entertainment. Leaders from what Autodesk calls the “design and make” industries were asked to report on a wide range of topics,…

‘Fast Company’ global design editor Mark Wilson goes behind the scenes with the band in Budapest to decode the disciplined chaos of their genre-defying visual experiments. View the full article

Snagging an internship can help future employees enhance their skills and knowledge and, overall, make them more desirable employees. But when it comes to actually working as an intern, not every company is a desirable place to be. Fortunately, Glassdoor, a company that analyzes workplace trends, explored thousands of intern reviews to put together its thorough list of the Best Internships of 2025. This year’s list includes 13 technology companies and six finance companies, with various other industries represented. The top companies offered not just competitive pay, but also roles that had a real impact—that is, the internships helped employees land jobs in the…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and health officials in several states are investigating a multistate Salmonella infection outbreak linked to whole cucumbers grown in Florida and shipped around the country. As a result of the ongoing investigation, health officials have recalled whole cucumbers grown by Bedner Growers Inc. and distributed by Fresh Start Produce Inc. between April 29, 2025, and May 19, 2025. As of Monday, 26 people have been infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella. Cases have been reported in 15 states. Nine people have been hospitalized; no deaths have been reported. Several pe…

On April 14, 2025, Blue Origin launched six women—Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyễn, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn and Lauren Sánchez—on a suborbital journey to the edge of space. The headlines called it a historic moment for women in space. But as a tourism educator, I paused—not because I questioned their experience, but because I questioned the language. Were they astronauts or space tourists? The distinction matters—not just for accuracy, but for understanding how experience, symbolism and motivation shape travel today. In tourism studies, my colleagues and I often ask what motivates travel and makes it a meaningful experience. These women crossed a boundary …

The 4chan website is down, and continues not to load for many users, according to Downdetector. (Downdetector is a platform that monitors online services and internet-related issues, and is essentially a crowd-sourced outage reporting tool.) This outage comes amid unconfirmed reports on social media, including on Reddit, that the internet message board was hacked. Fast Company has reached out to 4chan for comment and did not hear back immediately. The outage was first reported on Downdetector at around 9:57 p.m. ET on Monday night, and peaked soon after around 10:12 p.m. ET, when 1,265 users reported the problem. Since then, users have taken to monitoring the pla…

Alexandra Shaker, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a background across inpatient and outpatient treatment settings. She has experience in research, teaching, and clinical practice. Dr. Shaker’s writing is an interdisciplinary exploration of the human condition: she integrates psychology, literature, history, anthropology, and language to speak to the meaning and vitality we find in the stories we tell one another and ourselves. Dr. Shaker received her PhD in clinical psychology from The New School for Social Research and conducted her doctoral research at the Brief Psychotherapy Research Program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. She completed her clinical training …

Sign of the times: An AI agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article against an open-source software maintainer after he rejected its code contribution. It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution. Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code. So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of computer code) for Matplotlib, rejected and closed a routine code submission from the AI agent, called MJ Rathbun. Here’s where it gets weird(er). MJ Rathbun, an agent built using the buzzy agent…

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…

McDonald’s’ latest menu drop is making a Mormon treat mainstream. On Tuesday, April 28, McDonald’s officially announced six new beverages coming to its menu on May 6. That includes three “crafted sodas”—Sprite Berry Blast, Orange Dream, and Dirty Dr Pepper—which combine sodas with flavored syrups and cold foam. The drinks make McDonald’s the latest franchise to embrace the concept of “dirty soda,” or soda with mixed-in flavors and creams. But dirty soda is more than just a viral food trend: It’s a cultural mainstay of Mormon communities, which have embraced the concept since it first rose to prominence in Utah, where 42% of the adult population identifies as Morm…

Don’t let Canva’s rainbow gradients fool you. The Aussies are relentless, and their global conquest through easy-to-use design software continues as they set their sights on markets owned by Adobe and Microsoft. Even after a controversial price increase last year, growth is still explosive. Canva has added 50 million active users over the past 12 months, bringing its total to 230 million, with $3 billion in annual revenue. But despite this success, Canva decided it was time for a redesign. And it’s launching what the company considers its biggest overhaul since the app launched in 2012. It includes a Teams-crushing approach to file collaboration, a powerful AI-fueled spre…