Category Work

By Sarah Davis, HED  Across the country, many companies are establishing return-to-work mandates. Driven by existing lease agreements and lingering suspicion that remote workers aren’t as productive as they claim, most companies are ignoring a critical flaw in their RTO strategy: maybe it’s not that employees don’t want to be in the office—they just don’t want to be in your office. Data shows that as the pendulum is swinging back toward in-office work, workers across every generation overwhelmingly prefer a hybrid arrangement over fully remote work. The problem is, the offices they left five years ago when COVID hit haven’t changed, but…

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Written by Carolyn Shelby Ad-first publishing is collapsing, reshaping search, hosting, and the tools behind the blogging boom. Here’s what’s coming next. For (dangerously) close to three decades, a large portion of the web was built on a simple and incredibly profitable premise:  Slap some content on a page. Paste with ads. Collect the check.  This “blogging-for-dollars” model powered the growth of countless niche sites, media empires, and an entire supporting ecosystem of tools, services, and infrastructure.  But the model that once drove the golden age of attention-optimized publishing – where the sole goal was to generate pageviews, not serve a…

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Written by: Cristina Jerome For the past ten years, I’ve lived and breathed marketing. I’ve run social campaigns, worked with influencers, created content, built affiliate programs, and everything in between. One factor unites everything: Every single winning strategy has always tied back to community. And more often than not, when an initiative flops, it’s because that community is missing. When brands fail to engage, there’s a sense that they’re just pushing content onto their audience, rather than bringing people into a conversation and engaging with them. Community has always been critical. But in 2025, it matters more than ever. That’s why…

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Written by Darwin Santos What happens when being found no longer means being visited? The Great Decoupling is here – and it’s changing the web forever. This is the opening chapter of “The Last Click: How AI Agents Are Rewiring the Internet’s Attention Economy,” a series about how AI is changing the web. The email arrived at 3:47 a.m., marked urgent. Sarah Chen, head of content at a mid-sized publisher, was watching 20 years of assumptions collapse in real time. Her overnight analytics showed something impossible: search visibility had doubled in six weeks, yet traffic had fallen 30%. The charts on…

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By Dr. Gleb Tsipursky In 2025, a growing number of major employers are mandating full-time returns to the office. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Dell, and Goldman Sachs have all implemented five-day-a-week office mandates. Similarly, the federal government has followed suit; by early 2024, over 400,000 federal employees were required to be in the office at least two to three days per week, with some agencies enforcing full-time attendance.  Despite this trend, a comprehensive May 2025 report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), titled “Telework: Private Sector Stakeholder and Expert Views,” presents compelling evidence that these return-to-office (RTO) mandates may be misguided. The GAO’s findings…

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