*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).
Services aren't just for tech companies ー retailers are also latching onto the recurring revenue trend. And for industry vet Office Depot, the services model promises serious growth. "We are not a retailer, we are an omni-channel company," Office Depot CEO Gerry Smith told Cheddar, underscoring the importance of services revenue and Office Depot's business-to-business division.
Microsoft will continue to provide technology to U.S. agencies and the military, despite the objections raised by employees over how the products are being used, specifically with regard to immigration and border control. "We will be proactive in using our voice," said Microsoft President Brad Smith, speaking to Cheddar from the 2018 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. "We think we'll be more persuasive if we're engaged than if we withdraw."
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Political fixer-turned VC Bradley Tusk doesn't think it's sufficient to just bring voters to the polls ー he wants to bring the polls to them. "We know, fundamentally, democracy works when a lot of people vote, and it really doesn't work when very few people vote," Tusk told Cheddar on Tuesday.
Incoming Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, currently the company's EVP of small business, tells Cheddar that the software company plans to lean on its open platform and innovations in artificial intelligence to put more money in the pockets of its customers. "There is not enough we could do for our customers," Goodarzi said Tuesday.
Cheddar's Tanaya Macheel breaks down the crypto wallet firm Blockchain's newest ventures, including its giveaway of $125 million in tokens.
It's midterms day in America! After a whopping 36 million people voted early, many are predicting record voter turnout for this midterms election. Rapper Fat Joe joins Cheddar to talk about his efforts to get young voters to the polls as part of MTVs '+1 The Vote' campaign. And, we dig into reports that Amazon is splitting its second headquarters, also known as HQ2, between two different cities.
Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan spoke with Cheddar's Alex Heath from the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal about what they both look at before seeding a company. It all comes down to software.
Data collection and analysis is an increasingly crowded field, but SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie told Cheddar he isn't too concerned about industry upstarts ー especially not when he has General Data Protection Regulation compliance on his side.
Reports that Amazon may split its new headquarters between two locations is raising questions about the financial incentives offered by those cities bidding to become the new hub. “One of the questions that I’m left with following this reporting that there might be two cities instead of just one ... is whether this will change the incentives that some of the cities are offering in their draft plan,” Axios reporter Shannon Vavra told Cheddar Tuesday.
