*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).
Gibu Thomas, PepsiCo senior vice president and head of e-commerce, told Cheddar Monday that these new platforms are designed to meet customers' needs now.
The social media giant has invested $40 million into small businesses across the country with 50 percent of it earmarked for small businesses owned by people of color, women, and veterans.
Roku CFO Steve Louden told Cheddar that the coroanvirus pandemic has only sped up the process of cord-cutting and new viewership on streaming platforms.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
Alex Stamos, a security expert, spoke to Cheddar about how videoconferencing company Zoom is working toward improving security amid some challenges.
Dave Shull, TiVo CEO, told Cheddar on Thursday that the company has seen an increase in viewership amid the pandemic, which is why they were undaunted in releasing Stream 4K.
Jim Baumbick, vice president of enterprise product line management at Ford, told Cheddar on Wednesday that the company began shipping respirators to hospitals on Monday and has the capability of producing 12,000 units a week.
As governments around the world consider how to monitor new coronavirus outbreaks while reopening their societies, many are starting to bet on smartphone apps to help stanch the pandemic. But their decisions on which technologies to use — and how far those allow authorities to peer into private lives — are highlighting some uncomfortable trade-offs between protecting privacy and public health.
Companies across a wide swath of industries have found ways to give back to communities in their time of need amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Workers from some of the biggest companies in the U.S. held walkouts or sick-outs on Friday in honor of May Day to pressure their employers to improve working conditions and pay amid the coronavirus pandemic.
