Orange buys stake in internet content provider

France Telecom’s Orange has bought a 34.15% stake in the web operations of French radio station Skyrock for €14m.

In fact, Orange will buy the stake in Cascadia, a company newly formed to hold the web and mobile operations of Skyrock, which targets the 12-24 age group. Cascadia’s main asset is the Skyrock.com blog platform, which has nearly one billion pages viewed every month. The platform has more than 33 million active blogs.

Elie Girard, executive vice president in charge of group strategy and development, said: “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.”