*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).
At TwitchCon 2018, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear sat down with Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg to discuss the streaming platform's explosive growth, the rise of Fortnite, and Twitch's relationship with parent company Amazon.
"Red Dead Redemption 2" hit store shelves on Friday with big ambitions. The hotly anticipated game, seven-years in the making, was met with wide acclaim, boosting stock in the game-maker, Take-Two Interactive ($TTWO), and earning comparisons to the mega-hit "Grand Theft Auto V." "Everyone loves 'Grand Theft Auto,' and they just believe that anything Rockstar [Games] can make is going to be a sure-fire hit," Peter Brown, Managing Editor for GameSpot said in an interview on Cheddar.
Next week marks 10 years since the debut of Bitcoin, and it's been a decade of both big ups and big downs. In a special episode of Cheddar's Crypto Craze, we looked at how the digital currency landscape has evolved since that fateful day in 2008.
Since Dailymotion was acquired in 2015 by French media conglomerate Vivendi, the video-sharing platform has grown its audience exponentially, according to CEO Maxime Saada. And now, the company's focus is fixed squarely on one concept: premium. "We decided to focus on premium content, premium audience, premium partner," told Cheddar Thursday.
U.S. stocks fell sharply Friday, putting the S&P on track for its worst monthly drop in 10 years. Tech stocks were among the biggest losers, with Amazon losing nearly 8 percent and Snap closing at another record low.
A regulatory crackdown on behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook is more likely than ever, according to Brian McCullough, author of "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone."
Mozilla is looking to capitalize on consumers' increased awareness of data privacy with new anti-tracking features built into the latest version of its Firefox browser. The new tools are part of Mozilla's commitment to giving "agency" back to the user, COO Denelle Dixon said Thursday in an interview on Cheddar.
The fast-paced push to bring autonomous vehicles to market is at sharp odds with an imperative to make the tech safe and trustworthy. Both new tech companies and legacy automakers are under pressure from investors to show off their advances in autonomous vehicle deployment ー or risk being cast aside as has-beens, unable to keep pace.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Twitter shares are surging Thursday after the company smashed its third-quarter earnings report, posting a nearly 30 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a nine percent increase in the all-important daily active user metric. The release did not disclose the actual number of DAUs.
