French operator Orange has acquired a 34.15% minority interest in Cascadia, the company newly formed to hold Skyrock’s web operations, for €14 million.
The company said that the acquisition will strengthen Orange’s position in the 12-24 age group, where Skyrock.com is the leading blog platform in France in terms of pages viewed, with nearly one billion per month.
Cascadia combines the web and mobile operations of Skyrock, France’s leading radio station in the 12-24 age group. Its leading asset is the Skyrock.com blog platform.
In the footsteps of Deezer and Dailymotion, Skyrock.com will enrich the editorial knowhow, community-based content, monetisation capacity and technologies for sharing within the digital ecosystem of Orange and the Group’s partner companies.
Several commercial agreements were signed in parallel to leverage these synergies: distribution agreement with Dailymotion to support the promotion of the Skyrock.com site on Dailymotion and the mutual visibility of each on both sites; service agreement with Orange (and its service suites) giving it access to the design and development expertise of the Skyrock.com teams; and advertising agreement with Deezer and Orange Liveradio allowing the advertising department of Skyrock to market certain audio inventories.
As Elie Girard, EVP in charge of group strategy and development, said in a statement: “This acquisition is another illustration of the role Orange intends to play on the web. Following the acquisition of stakes in Deezer and Dailymotion, Orange is strengthening its positions in content aggregation. This enables us to be even more receptive to our customers and particularly the 12-24 age group. In addition, we will benefit from the web expertise of the Skyrock teams in developing supplementary services to be integrated into the Orange sites.”
