Orange announced that it has paid 14 million euros to acquire a 34.15% minority interest in Cascadia, a holding company which combines the web and mobile operations of Skyrock, France’s leading radio station in the 12-24 age group.
Skyrock's web operations are concentrated in the Skyrock.com blog platform, the leading platform in France in terms of pages viewed (nearly one billion per month) and the third in terms of unique visitors (8.57 million unique visitors in September 20111). With more than 33 million active blogs, the platform has an audience share of 83% in the 12-24 age group.

Skyrock is a pioneer in new digital communication services: starting out with blogs and instant messaging, and more recently a participatory questions and answers service (kwest), the group is now exploring future geo-localized and group messaging services for mobile users.

Orange said this acquisition is a new milestone in it's digital strategy, which is focused on improving the quality of its services for interacting, exploring and sharing. Orange already has stakes in French Internet companies Deezer and DailyMotion.

For Skyrock,  the association with Orange opens up new prospects formobiles, tablets and TV, and in particular in community-based services.

Several commercial agreements were signed in parallel to leverage these synergies:
* a distribution agreement with Dailymotion to support the promotion of the Skyrock.com site on Dailymotion and the mutual visibility of each on both sites;

* a service agreement with Orange (and its service suites) giving it access to the design and development expertise of the Skyrock.com teams; and

* an advertising agreement with Deezer and Orange Liveradio allowing the advertising department of Skyrock to market certain audio inventories.