Growing the Revenue Meta Earns from Facebook Stories
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for Facebook Stories, the full-screen posts that people tap through and that disappear after 24 hours. Your goal is to make Stories earn more money. How would you improve its monetization?
Walk through where Stories revenue comes from, whom you would focus on, what you would build or change, how you would prioritize and how you would measure success.
```hint Find the weak lever
Break Stories revenue into its drivers, such as how many people watch, how many ads they see and how much advertisers pay for each view. Work out which driver lags and why before proposing a feature, and keep in mind that viewers, the people who post, businesses and creators each feel a change differently.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Does Stories already show ads, and is the aim more revenue from that format or new revenue sources beyond ads?
- Is the target short-term revenue, or long-term revenue without reducing how much people watch and post Stories?
- Is the gap mainly too little inventory (not enough Stories viewing) or low prices (advertisers paying little per view)?
- Can the answer use placements that span Meta's apps, such as one Stories campaign running on Facebook and Instagram together, or should it stay within Facebook?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A breakdown of Stories revenue into its drivers, used to find the one that lags.
- The parties involved (viewers, people who post, advertisers of different sizes and creators) and a justified focus.
- Solutions tied to that group's specific pain points, such as the effort of making full-screen vertical ads or doubts about how well they perform, in a clear priority order.
- A revenue success metric with guardrails on viewing, posting and ad quality, plus a way to tell new revenue from revenue moved over from Feed ads.
- Risks such as ad fatigue, cannibalization of other ad placements and damage to the casual feel of Stories.
### Follow-up Questions
- Revenue rises after your change, but people start posting fewer stories. What do you do?
- How would you test whether new Stories ad revenue is truly incremental rather than shifted from other placements?
- What would make Stories ads work for a small business that has never produced a video?
Overview: A product improvement question about growing the revenue Facebook Stories earns. It tests breaking Stories revenue into its drivers, choosing between viewers, advertisers and creators as the focus, proposing prioritized monetization ideas, and defining a revenue metric with guardrails for engagement, posting and cannibalization.