Ever noticed that cursed corner restaurant? The one with a revolving door of hopeful new owners, always promising a fresh concept, then quietly disappearing six months later? Same building. Same layout. Same fate. You can’t quite explain why...until you realize it’s not about the food, it’s...
(I'm republishing this oldie but goodie from a few years back, as I realized I accidentally put it back into my drafts!) Why do certain creators succeed at monetizing their fans on platforms like Patreon, Koji and Gumroad, but others fail? A grossly over-simplified conclusion is that TikTok...
"An editor, a editor, my kingdom for an editor!" Almost every creator I know is looking for an editor. Not just any editor. That one elusive hire that is a one-in-a-million find: an editor who gets their *taste*. Not just someone who trims clips, but someone who instinctively...
I’m now a few years into my journey into the creator economy. As Google's first Head of Creator Relations, then Koji's Head of Creators, I’ve learned a ton about the challenges of creators of all types and sizes. Some are similar, some very different:...
We're closer than you might think to getting the first video implementations in the exploding field of generative AI. Runway, an AI-assisted browser-based video editing suite, has been at the forefront of generative video for a while now, and they've just launched their biggest milestone yet:...
Despite technological advancements, there is one particularly fascinating bottleneck holding back the full potential of generative AI today: humans
The story of why we perceive film as moving pictures, how TVs work, and how our brains create reality.
There's a category of side hustles that isn't soul crushing and might become more popular: Monetizing hobbies, passions and interests that people already have.
If you're a content creator or brand on social media, do this one thing today (and if you work with creators, forward this): Ask 10 regular visitors why they're following you. Deceptively basic, right? Let's analyze: Most creators or social media channels don'...
Creators are often taught that they have to be consistent - but it's not just content that needs it.
An interesting paradox of the creator economy: Once a creator embraces the idea they're a business, they get the power to do *less* business-y stuff. Wait what?
If there’s one generation-defining skill that creators need to learn going forward, what will it be? My bet: The ability to make, then monetize fans.
Here are five promising ways to auto-reframe, or smart crop horizontal to vertical video.
How does a creator ‘figure things out’ and become successful? The key is to make experimentation at the *business* level as cheap as on the content side.
Friday, April 1 (no April fools!) is my last day at Google. My mom reminded me recently that when I started coding at the age of 12, my dream was to one day work at Google. I still can’t believe that this German high school dropout somehow managed to...
Influencer-led businesses face a series of challenges that others don't. Here's how they differ from your standard business.
There's no standard method, but there's an easy hack to do this. Click through to learn how.
There's no need at all for the web3 in order for creators to reclaim their independence. It can all be done on the existing web.
Hear me talk about where the the part of the web is going that is “content”, why it’s so critical to invest in it & the web creator landscape, and what Google is doing about it.
What makes a piece of content, or sub-platform truly open, and part of the open web's content corpus? Here's a framework to help you answer this question.
Remy recently posted an interesting, thought-provoking read on framework fatigue and how we’re making the web more complex ourselves: If you didn’t gather off the bat from the title, the problem with developing front end projects isn’t that it’s harder or more complicated, it’s that...
How should using the web feel like? What should the experience be like? What is the web we want?
GIFs are bad. Not in popular thing (looping animations), but the technology behind it.
I’ve recently read that we should consume less and create more, and it’s a very worthwhile read that much more elaborately expands on what I wrote about Gadget Zombies couple years ago. I wrote my original post 7 years ago, but it’s one of the few things...
TL;DR: I built a CSS-only (~ish) solution for multiline truncated text with read more button. The other day, truncated text came up during a discussion in the office, and I since wondered if CSS has come far enough to be able to do truncated text right, that is, supporting...
I couple years ago I had lunch with a successful serial entrepreneur in San Francisco. Mid way into the conversation we talked about which ideas get funded on Sand Hill Road and which do not. One thing we both agreed on is that no VC will fund projects without product-market...
The story of our perception of time, or why things that feel fast are often better than things that are fast.
If you've been reading about the latest in CSS, you might have read about flow-root. Flow root establishes a new block formatting context, but most have dismissed it as simply replacing clearfix hacks. But consider this extremely common case, where you have a few paragraphs of text, some...
TL;DR: I did a thing with Flexbox. Here's the CodePen. A couple days ago I was asked to create a the a page for AMPProject.org that would display our roadmap. Which I did. It looks like this: In order to make this design fully responsive, the...
A story about Microsoft's breakthroughs in magical web animations, and how they failed to bring them to the rest of the world.
It's easy to state that a higher number is better. It's also easy to get sucked into (albeit interesting) theories and at other times non-researched half-truths when debating film projection technology and frame rate. But there are very simple, very reasonable arguments for not only high...
As much as there are people who will tell you to always use 24fps for a cinematic look, the truth is, the definition of what makes a film look cinematic varies, and maybe you're aiming for something different! Frame rate is as much a creative choice as color,...
Native platform providers boast with the large new feature sets they add to their OS’es every year. But when comparing themselves directly to the web platform, they’re conveniently missing the simple fact that they can do so only for the lack of standardization. Corporate platforms come and go...
One common misconception that I’m hearing over and over is that popularity of a product is an indication of its quality. I’ve met (and worked with) many that were convinced that a game, for instance, had to be popular to be “good”. By that logic, McDonalds is the...
Remember directories? I do, and so should you. Here's the case for why they need to come back.
I started sorting developers into two buckets. This helps me understand how to work with them. As far as I can tell, there are two types of developers: 1. The one who loves to code. 2. The one who loves to code to make a product better. The first (the...
3D movies are gaining in popularity but when they first arrived, many critics deemed the technology as a short-lived boom, as it had too many issues. Movie goers complained about headaches, blurry and dark pictures. In 2012, a lot of the first step mistakes have been addressed. The Hobbit was...