Axios

The Walking Dead's eighth season premiere aired last weekend to a five-year ratings low with its total viewers down one-third from last season's kickoff, per Variety. But AMC's flagship zombie series also sustained a severe dip in another measure: online piracy. Users torrenting this year's premiere were down 42% from last year, according to the piracy measurement service TECXIPIO.

Why it matters: A 2013 Columbia University study indicated that pirates are overwhelmingly likely to be younger and more technologically savvy — exactly the target audience a network would desire for driving a zeitgeisty television series. So while AMC might chalk up the drop in viewers illegally watching The Walking Dead to its anti-piracy efforts, this trend suggests that the network's cash cow series is losing its cachet with intelligent, Internet-savvy users while a contemporary like Game of Thrones has seen both its ratings and piracy numbers go through the roof.

Many gig economy startups have shut their doors, but two on-demand cleaning companies are showing signs of economic viability:

• Handy, which provides cleaning and other home services, is profitable and cash flow positive, a source tells Axios.
• Managed by Q, which provides cleaning and other office management services, said on Friday that its core office services business is profitable. Not included in that top-line math: employee stock grants, NYC headquarters rent and expenses for employees not working on that core business.

Facebook announced Friday details around a feature to make all ads, including political ads, visible to users on its platform in the coming months. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be adding this feature in a video message last month, but didn't have implementation details to share at the time.

Why it matters: Facebook is responding to pressure from lawmakers concerned about the way Russian actors were able to buy ads focused on divisive political issues during the election. The company will be testifying before House and Senate Intelligence committees next week, and this is the company's way of getting ahead of questions about steps it's taken to improve transparency on its platform.

About the new feature:

• Timing: Facebook says it will start testing the feature in Canada and will roll it out to the U.S. by this summer — ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November — as well as broadly to all other countries around the same time. During this initial test, Facebook will only show active ads, or ads that are currently running. However, Facebook says that when expand to the United States beginning next month, it plan to begin building an archive of historical and current federal-election related ads.
• Functionality: People will be able to click "View Ads" on any Facebook Page to be able to view the ads that particular Page is running, regardless of whether the person viewing the ads is being targeted by those ads.
• Scope: Every Facebook Page will be included in this change and Facebook will require that all ads be associated with a Page as part of the ad creation process. (Facebook announced earlier this year that Pages creating too much fake news would be stripped of their ability to sell ads until they stopped posting fake news.)
• Political ads: For each federal-election-related ad, Facebook says it will now include the ad in a searchable archive that, once full, will cover a rolling four-year period (starting from when it launches the archive). Facebook says it will also provide details on the total and average amounts spent, the number of impressions delivered, and the demographics information (e.g. age, location, gender) about the audience that was targeted by the ads.

New details around advertiser documentation:

• Timing: As Facebook has previously suggested, it will now require more thorough documentation from advertisers who want to run election-related ads. It will begin requiring more documentation for federal elections in the United States, and will eventually expand to include additional contests and elections in other countries.
• Adding "Paid for by" disclosure text: Facebook says that advertisers may (no details around when scrutiny will be applied) be required to identify that they are running election-related advertising and verify both their entity and location. Once verified, advertisers will have to include a disclosure in their election-related ads, which reads: "Paid for by". When users click on the disclosure, they will be able to see details about the advertiser and an explanation of why they saw that particular ad.
• Adding machine learning: For political advertisers that do not proactively disclose themselves, Facebook is building machine learning tools that will help the company find those advertisers and then require them to verify their identity.

Go deeper: Per Axios' David McCabe: "Facebook and Twitter have now both made a play at self-regulating political ads on their platforms. But it's not clear that will be enough to stop Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar and Republican John McCain from pushing a bill that would put new transparency requirements into law. "We look forward to engaging with Members of Congress and other key stakeholders on these issues as the legislative process continues," Twitter said in its blog post announcing the changes earlier this week."

Walmart is expanding its use of robotic shelf-scanning technology it says will be able to alert store managers when items are running low on store shelves, or if items have misplaced, 3x faster and more accurately than human associates, Reuters reports.

Why it matters: Employment at brick-and-mortar retail operations has been declining throughout the year, even as the economy and overall employment has been growing at a healthy pace. Innovations like Walmart's will only continue to reduce demand for these traditional retail jobs.

"How Did David Rubenstein — Yes, That David Rubenstein — Become a TV Star? He's a socially awkward 68-year-old private equity titan — and his show is one of Bloomberg's fastest-growing programs," by Washingtonian's Ben Wofford:

"At 68, David Rubenstein [co-founder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group] is now host of his own show on Bloomberg Television. The half-hour program — The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations — plops him beside fellow CEOs of the billionaire class, with the occasional sports star and military general thrown in: Berkshire Hath­away's Warren Buffett, Oprah, Coach K, David Petraeus."