*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).
Amazon will get a lot more than 3,000 brick-and-mortar stores when it builds out its cashierless Amazon Go chain.
The tech giant announced a slew of new products and software for Alexa-enabled homes, betting that the voice assistant becomes the entryway into the company's ecosystem for many households. Among the new Echo devices: a microwave, a wall clock, and the Echo Auto.
Thursday's IPO, with shares priced at $23 near the high end of its range, implied a valuation of nearly $1.8 billion. By midday, the stock was trading over $37. Julia Hartz, Eventbrite CEO, said the company's relentless focus on the "mid-market" protects it from competition from Ticketmaster or Facebook.
What does crypto have to do with journalism? Civil Media thinks it can be the answer to some of the field's woes, from eroding trust to a collapsing business model. As CEO Matthew Iles explained, the start-up's token sale can help build an infrastructure that will serve as a new economy for newsrooms.
Eventbrite, the online "do-it-yourself" ticketing agency, went public on the NYSE Thursday with shares priced at $23. By midday though, the stock, trading under the ticker EB, was at $37. The company's Chief Brand Officer Brian Irving joined Cheddar to discuss the debut.
The one-time Beatle is back at #1, and he didn't do it solely by selling albums. Austin Powell, managing editor at The Daily Dot, explains how McCartney was able to use the new music economy dominated by Spotify and Apple Music to his advantage.
The difference between the wild valuations and stock moves in the nascent pot industry and those of the turn-of-the-century dot-com stocks (Pets.com, anyone?) is that cannabis "is a market that actually exists," said financier Terry Taouss of cannabis financing company Tidal Royalty.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
Naz Aletaha, head of esports partnerships for Riot Games, said that the "priceless" experiences with new global sponsor Mastercard will start with the world championships in October, offering premium content and behind the scenes access to the biggest event for esports lovers.
Raymond Wong, senior tech correspondent at Mashable, shares his thoughts on Apple's new iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR.
