*By Conor White*
After losing $136 billion in market cap in less than a week, Facebook is looking for ways to reinvigorate its outlook at a time of slowing ad revenue growth, [continued fallout](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-stock-crushed-after-disappointing-earnings) from the Cambridge Analytical data privacy scandal, and the [latest revelation](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/facebook-political-campaign-midterms.html) Tuesday that it's detected attempts to influence this November's midterm elections.
"It's been a long 2018 for Facebook," said Madison Malone Kircher, an associate editor at New York Magazine. "Which brings us to the one thing Facebook is doing right, and that's the Stories platform. It works really well on Instagram, which Facebook owns, and they've really been trying to push to make it work on Facebook."
Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, double the number of users of rival Snapchat, and Facebook has been trying to lure advertisers to the Stories platform.
Kircher said in an interview Tuesday with Cheddar that neither of the social media companies has figured out how to make user-generated stories on their platforms profitable.
"Snapchat, which is the creator of this style of posting, has also struggled with it," Kircher said. "They rolled out a new platform called 'Commercials' this week, which is similarly trying to figure out how to sell ads against this style of content."
In the end, Kircher said Facebook can push Stories to advertisers all it wants, but it won't be successful until it's popular with users.
"It's a two-fold problem Facebook has," Kircher said. "One, trying to convince advertisers to buy ads in this space, but first they have to figure out how to get us to use it."
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-pushing-stories-feature-to-advertisers).
Coming off of a fourth-quarter delivering just over 300,000 cars, Tesla is expected to report tremendous earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Al Root, a senior writer for Barron’s, spoke with Cheddar’s Baker Machado about the anticipated earnings report and speculated about what Elon Musk will discuss during the call with investors, including a Cybertruck update, new factories, a possible new vehicle, and/or new larger form batteries. "There's a menu of things he could talk about, and any combination of those would be good," said Root.
The American Federation Teachers Union has announced its latest partnership with NewsGuard in efforts to help educators play a greater role in deciphering facts from fiction that students see online. They say the goal is to help students build critical-thinking skills while also teaching them the importance of media literacy. Executive Vice President of Partnerships at NewsGuard, Sarah Bandt, joined Cheddar to talk more.
James Whitley, Core Contributor at cypher, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses the underlying factors that support a bounce-back for Bitcoin despite the token's recent slump.
Commercial and residential buildings account for 13% of carbon emissions in the U.S., according to the EPA, and one company says it has a solution. Runwise says it has updated the boiler and heating systems of thousands of buildings, and that its technology not only lowers carbon output but also saves landlords money. Lee Hoffman, Co-Founder and COO of Runwise, joined Cheddar Climate to discuss.
Following sales tech startup Scratchpad raising $33 million in Series B Funding, CEO and co-founder Pouyan Salehi joined Cheddar to discuss how his company's software works to help salespeople with an all-in-one workspace, integrating with Salesforce to optimize notes, spreadsheets, and other relevant information so businesses can forecast and make the best decisions. "If you look at other crafts like artists, they'll have studios; chefs, they'll have kitchens; scientists will have labs, and we just asked, well, if you look at sales as a craft, why doesn't something exist that is designed solely for a salesperson?" Salehi said about his workspace app.
Google could be gearing up to release its own wearable device as rumors swirl about a potential smartwatch with the Pixel brand. Jon Prosser, the creator of Front Page Tech, who tweeted a possible leak about the product, joined Cheddar's "Closing Bell" to discuss potential the benefits of it entering the same space as the Apple Watch. Prosser said, while he doesn't expect it to launch until at least 2023, the Pixel Watch will be "one of the most vital, most important wearables that we can have on the market," noting that it won't likely challenge Apple for much market share but will set the standard for other Android wearables to come.
