*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).
OkCupid is getting political. The popular dating app is finding that millennials are prioritizing politics more than ever when looking for a partner in love. Melissa Hobley, CMO of OkCupid, said the app has been asking its users more questions about their political views and using that information to improve their matches.
Despite losing a significant amount in market cap after reporting platform revenue earnings that fell short of Wall Street estimates, Roku CEO Anthony Wood said he isn't worried about the company's long-term prospects. "Our business is just fundamentally strong," Wood said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
Americans seem to agree on at least one thing: no one likes a traffic jam — and congestion is at its all-time worst. Transportation was a prominent subject of this year's midterm elections. Election Day hosted over 300 transportation and infrastructure initiatives on the ballot, and on both the state and local levels, a number of newly-elected officials are now faced with the task of shaping that legislation and policy.
Bitmain’s Vice President of BTC.com, Alejandro De La Torre, addressed many of the controversies confronting the world's largest crypto mining company in a rare interview with Cheddar. He also said Bitmain is observing more people mining, even as the price of Bitcoin has decreased.
Gillian Tans, the CEO of Booking.com, spoke with Cheddar's Alex Heath at the Web Summit about how the the platform known for hotel deals is transitioning into a full service travel concierge.
Disney's new streaming service and its acquisition of Fox assets will be the main fixation when the entertainment giant reports earnings and revenue after market close on Thursday.
Elon Musk will have someone to answer to at Tesla. The electric carmaker announced late Wednesday that Robyn Denholm would take Musk's place as chair of the board. Denholm, a Tesla board member, will leave her job as chief financial officer of Telstra, an Australian telco giant and inherit Musk's chairman duties full-time in six months when her notice period is complete.
Ford, the century-old automaker that all but invented the concept of the modern car, said it would acquire e-scooter start-up Spin as part of a broad re-positioning of the company as a mobility services provider in an era when car ownership is but one of many options for getting around. Cheddar discussed the strategy behind the acquisition with Sunny Madra, the vice president of tech incubator Ford X, and Euwyn Poon, the co-founder and president of Spin.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Adrian Lovett, president and CEO of the non-profit Web Foundation, told Cheddar's Alex Heath why the rate of people getting online for the first time is becoming stagnant.
