*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).
Jesse Dorogusker, the company's Hardware Lead, said the new device fits the mission to meet the needs of a broader array of vendors. The launch comes about a week after CFO Sarah Friar said she was leaving the company to become CEO of social networking site Nextdoor.
JT Genter, senior points and miles writer at The Points Guy, strapped in for the newly-revived, 18-hour direct flight between Singapore and Newark, NJ, on Singapore Airlines. He told us how he coped with what is now the longest flight in the world.
The economic opportunity for bitcoin has breathed new life into a previously retired aluminum plant in Massena, New York. Cheddar visited Coinmint to get a look inside one of the world's largest bitcoin mining operations.
Popular courier service Postmates is interviewing banks with the intention of going public in early 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal's Maureen Farrell. It's part of a changing dynamic, where red-hot tech companies are now racing to market, rather than waiting.
The worst data breach in Facebook's history was likely done by spammers, not a foreign state, according to a report. Whether that's any comfort to the tens of millions of people whose personal information ー including names, emails, religious affiliations, and locations ー was accessed in the wide-ranging attack remains to be seen.
Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, isn't buying into the Netflix hype even after the good Q3 earnings.
Discord, initially a popular app for in-game messaging, is launching a store with hundreds of games users can access for a monthly fee. Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO of Discord, said the company's growth is a "side effect" of gaming becoming more social.
MedMen, which just completed the largest pot-related acquisition to date in America, is preparing for the day when American drug laws catch up, said spokesman Daniel Yi.
Atari, the popular French gaming company, is now open to investments from U.S. investors through its new affiliation with with Nasdaq International. Frederic Chesnais, CEO of Atari, told Cheddar about the partnership.
Loren Padelford, Shopify vice president and general manager, had spent Wednesday morning monitoring the cannabis transactions taking place on Canadian Shopify-powered sites and said the demand was outpacing even his company's bullish forecasts.
