Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer and Firefox, has raised $8M in a Series B round with Benchmark Capital.
We covered Conduit a couple of times early last year when the company had 25,000 partners and 5M toolbar installs. The company now has 140,000 partners with 12M+ installs. The company is cash-flow positive and describes its “web community toolbar” offering as a superior alternative to personalized homepages like Netvibes or Pageflakes, which it says require too much time to set up.
I’m not a big fan of browser toolbars myself; all the major browsers have search functionality and pop-up blockers built into them these days, bookmarks work just fine for me, and RSS readers do a better job aggregating the content I want to read anyway. But I can see publishers loving toolbars since they effectively market their brands by showing their logos to users every time they surf the net. And they are probably quite appealing to users who are loyal fans of very few sites, and who don’t care about giving up a little browser real estate space.
Who is the leader in downloaded toolbars?
It looks like an easy haven for spammers.
most non tech users already have 2-3 toolbars in their browsers, and dont know how to remove them and dont know what are they for. Insalling yahoo messenger brings yahoo toolbar, samefor ICQ, and other. Google toolbar comes even in Java Virtual Machine update.
Whats the point of creating another toolbar mess? people dont use them, they accidentally click trying to find out what it is for.
If you would like a “Portable Toolbar” in which you can take all of your favorite websites with you on any browser, on any computer, anywhere in the world at any time … you might want to check out Mobile O/X - http://MobileOX.com
You basically type in your very own “Personalized Domain” - something like “David.LovesBaseball.com or Jill.WritesPoetry.com” - and up pops your “Portable Toolbar / Page.”
Thanks for the write up, Mark.
The right number of toolbar installations is actually more than 30M (and not 12M as mentioned above).
Conduit offers much more than just a customizable browser toolbar. We offer our publishers a powerful tool to syndicate their content, and a direct, real-time connection to their subscribers.
It’s free, it’s on-demand and it works - that’s why Benchmark decided to invest in Conduit, that’s why more than 140,000 publishers are promoting their Conduit powered toolbar, and that’s why at least one Conduit powered toolbar is downloaded at any given second.
Best,
Hai Habot
Marketing Manager, Conduit.
8m down the fucking drain
Two things regarding Conduit:
* Distribution - They claim to have over 150,000 publishers. However, based on my sources in Israel, a significant amount of their daily install volume (50%+) comes from a single distribution network called Key2Peer.
Monetization - Conduit has a deal with Google to drive search box traffic to a search result page. The user experience of that page is terrible and deceiving. Seven sponsored results are displayed at the top and for most internet users above the fold line! How did Google approve this poor user experience?!
Incredimail showed us earlier this week the dangers in relaying on a single partner to monetize or distribute. I hope for Conduit they will find a way to diversify their traffic and $$$ sources.