LinkedIn has revealed the UK's top 20 influential brands using its own engagement rates score. LinkedIn used its own Content Marketing Score for brands to determine the list, which saw traditional brands like the Financial Times and Ernst & Young claim top spots.

The broader story came from The Intercept and Denmark's Dagbladet Information, which has revealed how some foreign governments that aren't in the Anglophone "Five Eyes" club allowed the NSA to tap the core fiberoptic cables running through their territory. This is apparently in addition to NSA tapping operations that rely only on cable companies' connivance, without the knowledge of local authorities.

An American millionaire placed envelopes full of cash all over a park and sent clues to their location out via the social networking site. People were told to look for a "large space where green meets blue. Saturday neither early nor late" that shares a name with a place in California. Those who couldn't work it out from that were told to think about where Peter Pan might go for a swim.

Speaking at Cannes Lions, Jeffrey Katzenberg said that in just five years, YouTube will become the key platform on which consumers view media. This means it will be even more popular than television. In response to this prediction, Dreamworks has launched a brand new YouTube channel called 'DreamworksTV', which is aimed at families, reports telegram.com.

Blinkbox and 4Music have struck up a deal which will see the channel act as official broadcast partner for blinkbox music UK Live. The partnership includes backstage coverage presented by 4Music's Miquita Oliver to include interviews, backstage footage and live performances from Jessie J, The Saturdays, The Vamps and Jason Derulo.

Yahoo is set to expand its activities in the in Europe, Middle East and African markets with the appointment of Omnicom Media Global's chief investment officer Marc Bignell. He will report to Yahoo's senior vice president of EMEA, Dawn Airey. His appointment looks set to re-strengthen Yahoo's commercial team after the departure of three-year Yahoo managing director James Wildman in February.

Metro received its highest ever web traffic in May, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) yesterday. Monthly unique browsers for the news outlet topped 29.3 million last month, an increase of 29.6 per cent on April and 198.2 per cent on May 2013. Metro relaunched its website under a mobile-first strategy at the end of 2012, and although it initially brought a drop in traffic to the website, the number of unique monthly browsers has almost quadrupled since.

The German publisher Axel Springer has bought a minority stake in a French search engine called Qwant, which focuses on user privacy and sorts its results into streams for the web, news, social, shopping and so on. Axel Springer spokesman Michael Schneider said the publishing house - which is getting into digital in a big way - saw search as crucial to its various websites in general.

Facebook was unavailable worldwide for more than 30 minutes on Thursday morning, the longest outage on the site for four years. Both the website and the company's smartphone and tablet apps were affected, as users decamped to other social networks to complain about the failure. The site collapsed at 8:53am BST, showing visitors the following error message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can." It stayed unavailable until 9:24am BST, when the site and apps began working as normal.

The top 100 digital agencies across the UK continue to expand, generating a combined income of GBP1.48bn, according to research from Econsultancy. Agencies across the UK have been ranked according to their fee income from their domestic digital activities, as marketing spend on digital expands. The total fee income reported by the top 100 agencies this year is GBP1.48bn, 23% higher than the fee income reported last year by those in the Top 100.