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The GRADIENT: Why Taste Is the New Moat

Creators embrace Beehiiv’s push beyond newsletters

With its latest slew of updates, Beehiiv is pushing beyond a newsletter hosting platform and positioning itself as a place where creators can build full websites, sell digital products, integrate podcasts and YouTube feeds and research audience analytics. Creators have largely welcomed the new set of business tools, revealed on Thursday (Nov. 13). Four creators

Our favourite Apple desktop gets a $100 discount

Need a more portable workstation? Apple‘s popular Mac mini desktop is currently $100 off over at Best Buy, down to just $499 for the M4 model. This is a great price and one of the best offers we’ve seen on this mini PC since it launched almost exactly a year ago. In our Mac mini

ChatGPT Outage Affects APIs And File Uploads

OpenAI is experiencing a widespread outage affecting two systems, APIs and ChatGPT. The outage has been ongoing for at least a half an hour as of publication date. ChatGPT API Jobs Stuck Outage The first issue is that batch API jobs get stuck in the finalization state. There are twelve components of APIs that are

4 Ways Walmart’s Incoming CEO Has Already Set Up the Retailer For Success

Walmart’s new CEO is a longtime veteran of the retailer. John Furner, who oversaw the giant’s U.S. business since 2019, will become President and CEO of Walmart starting Feb. 1, becoming the company’s fifth CEO since the days of founder Sam Walton. Furner succeeds Doug McMillon, who is retiring and has led Walmart since 2014.

Pentagram design Mozilla’s new internet-savvy editorial platform Nothing Personal

The NP. mark is “deliberately simple”, focusing on a character that comes from its behaviour rather than its look. “It often overlays imagery, not to obscure but to create another layer of meaning. It becomes both a window and a veil, echoing how identity functions online – always present, always mediated,” says Natasha. The colour

AI Shopping, GPT-5.1, And EU Pressure On Google

This week’s news in SEO brings changes and questions about control. Google’s shopping AI moved from showing where to buy to completing purchases directly. Google added structured data for merchant shipping policies. OpenAI released GPT-5.1 with personality controls. And the EU opened an investigation into Google’s site reputation abuse enforcement. Raising the question, should one

The quiet positioning mistakes that kill growth

Many teams position around what sounds compelling instead of what’s true. It works for a moment — demos spike and early reactions look positive. However, the gap between the pitch and the product is always evident during onboarding. That gap is where credibility breaks. A chocolate ad struck me as funny — and not in

Retro-inspired shooter Birdcage feels like it’s 1998 again, right down to purposeful slowdown

One look at Birdcage and you might mistake it for an arcade shoot ’em up (or shmup, as it’s also known for short) from the late ’90s, in particular Treasure’s Radiant Silvergun. If you’re keen, check out the Evercade consoles for a lineup of classic shooters of the era, from SNK and Toaplan. It’s an

The Quid Pro No Method Of Link Building

Expressly paying for links has been out for awhile. Quid Pro No is in. These are some things you can do when a website asks for money in exchange for a link. During the course of building links, whether it’s free links, publishing an article or getting a brand mention, it’s not unusual to get

How Tesco combined emotion and practicality in its back-to-school print campaign

A newspaper ad for the retailer landed in the top 6% of all UK ads for “branding”, making it the most effective ad in the latest edition of Kantar’s ‘The Works’ study. While the halcyon days of print are behind it, the channel still holds relevance and trust with those consumers who still use it,

Snotmotion’s squidgy stop-motion shorts reenact the slapstick qualities of sport

On Snotmotions subject matter Kate says: “The aesthetics of sport, the motion and movements in sport, and the fact that there isn’t much talking is very interesting from an animation point of view.” Tennis is known for powered pitches and anime-fight-scene-like grunting; a ripe playground for Snotmotion’s N° 02 short. “Animating a tennis serve was

Google Sharpens Suspension Accuracy and Speeds Up Appeals for Advertisers

Google account suspensions have long been one of the most stressful issues advertisers face. A single notification can pause revenue, disrupt campaigns, and leave teams scrambling to understand what went wrong, often at no fault of their own. Over the past several months, Google has heard that feedback and is now rolling out measurable improvements

Identity is finally within reach for challenger brands

Ask the marketing leader of a typical challenger brand about identity and they’ll likely say more about aspirations than applications. Brand teams know that identity is fundamental to everything they care about, from finding new customers and lowering acquisition costs to accurately measuring campaign effectiveness and deeply understanding customer behavior. Yet despite a clear grasp

This Black Friday the iPad Pro is the only tablet to get for digital artists

I’ve been a bit of a critic of the over-powerful iPad Pro in recent years. Not because I don’t like it. It’s just I don’t like it for the majority of people. It’s total overkill for most people, and as Apple continue to blow us away with a new M chip every year, the iPad

Google Reminds Websites To Use One Review Target

Google updated its review snippet documentation to clarify that each review or rating in structured data should point to one clear target, reducing ambiguity. Google updated its review snippet docs to clarify how review targets should be specified You should avoid attaching the same review or rating to multiple different entities A quick audit of

Beehiiv Taps New Markets With Creator Platform Expansion

Beehiiv is no longer just a newsletter platform. On Thursday, the company released a sweeping slate of 10 new products at its Winter Release event, repositioning itself as a “creator-content operating system,” according to cofounder and chief executive Tyler Denk. The new suite includes an AI-powered website builder, digital product sales, podcast landing pages, web

Liang-Jung Chen’s latest project shows what happens when financial survival becomes the artwork

A large part of what keeps artists and the wider creative economy going is, in reality, a host of adjacent jobs. When you hang out with other creatives, conversations are always around “visas, rent, side jobs, funding, and survival strategies”, Liang shares. “Moonlighting is one of the most common topics; so many artists have so

Why Web Hosting Is A Critical Factor To Maximize SEO Results

Most SEO professionals obsess over content, links, and technical implementations. We track algorithm updates and audit on-page elements with precision. But there’s one factor that determines whether all that work can deliver results. Your web hosting controls every user’s first interaction with your site. It determines load speeds, uptime consistency, and Core Web Vitals scores

Where to start with AI-powered performance monitoring and optimization

At the November MarTech Conference, Sara Owens, SVP, analytics and data science at ARS X Machina convened a pragmatic panel on AI-powered performance with Anthony Tedesco, global search and programmatic lead, Cisco; Christina Inge, CEO of Thoughtlight; and Reza Moalandin, co-founder, SALT Agency. The conversation stayed refreshingly grounded: less hype, more playbooks. Perfect data vs.

Nab $750 off an M2 MacBook Pro with this early Black Friday deal

If you’re after a MacBook Pro that’s relatively affordable with a hefty 1TB storage, then I’ve found a deal over at Best Buy that knocks $750 off the 13-inch M2 model, bringing the price down to $1,349 from $2,099. I know this can still feel like a lot to spend on a MacBook that launched

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