*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).
PopSockets, the company behind the massively successful grips attached to the back of mobile phones, is eyeing a potential initial public offering, CEO and Founder David Barnett told Cheddar Thursday. "We are considering an IPO. We're considering all options," Barnett said in an interview with Cheddar Thursday.
Amazon whipsawed after the bell, first surging and then erasing its earlier gains, after beating Wall Street expectations on its top and bottom lines, but reporting weak outlook.
The Swedish point-of-sale finance company quietly put up ads in the U.S. last year but made a splasher introduction earlier this month when Snoop Dogg became the face of its latest campaign.
That campaign, called Smoooth Dogg, featured the Afghan dogs from Klarna’s previous campaigns and coincided with the announcement that Snoop has become a minor shareholder in the fintech startup.
Food pickup app Ritual has big expansion plans. But its founder says the company's rapid growth can actually be traced back to a slower start. "Ritual's about your neighborhood, and I think what a lot of other companies did differently was they tried to go too broad too quickly, and they just lack the depth and coverage that Ritual has," Ray Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Ritual, told Cheddar Wednesday. "And we still approach the world neighborhood by neighborhood, and ensure that it's actually compelling."
Step aside, Siri and Alexa. VR studio Fable is relaunching as a "virtual beings" company to bring the public its first A.I.-powered character with whom users can have a two-way relationship. According to co-founders Edward Saatchi and Pete Billington, the rebranding ー which the two announced at the 2019 Sundance Festival ー is partly an effort to educate consumers about machine learning.
Microsoft shares dropped in extended trading on Wednesday despite reporting better-than-expected quarterly earnings due to investor concerns about its crucial cloud business.
Tesla shares sank in extended trading on Wednesday after reporting mixed earnings and revenue. The electric carmaker reported earnings per share of $1.93 cents on revenue of $7.23 billion, just missing expectations on earnings, but beating on revenue. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters anticipated earnings of $2.20 per share on $7.08 billion in revenue.
Facebook soared in extended trading on Wednesday after reporting fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street forecasts. Facebook reported earnings per share of $2.38 on revenue of $16.91 billion. That topped analysts' expectations for $2.19 earnings per share on $16.4 billion in revenue, according to Thomson Reuters.
Visible wants to make signing up for a phone service as easy as calling a Lyft. The digital-only wireless carrier backed by Verizon offers unlimited text, talk, data, and hot-spot for $40 a month. CEO Miguel Quiroga, a telecom industry veteran, says that this is the phone service that consumers want.
As digital advertising is increasingly beholden to the Google/Facebook duopoly, Glamour is experimenting with what it sees as the future of the industry: a multi-faceted revenue model that uses a combination of traditional ads, metered or niche paywalls, events, audio and e-commerce, even as it kills off its one-time moneymaker, the monthly print edition. Samantha Barry, Glamour's editor-in-chief, told Cheddar in an interview Wednesday that she sees the 80-year-old iconic brand as a "service for women."
