Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, is opening up its platform to allow for distribution opportunities.
Conduit’s SaaS tool lets companies create and distribute their content and products on a custom community toolbar. Conduit, which we have covered previously here and here, has amassed a network of more than 200,000 web publishers who distribute their toolbars to more than 60 million users.
Conduit is now letting publishers add other publishers’ content to each others toolbars via a marketplace. And consumers can also get additional content for their Conduit toolbars from the marketplace or the website of anyone who is a Conduit user. The toolbar can be a useful marketing tool for companies because it helps market brands by showing logos to users every time they surf the net. And now multiple brands can tap into this potential.The offerings include major brands such as Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace and more (disclosure: TechCrunch also uses Conduit).
To date, Conduit has raised close to $10 million in funding and is currently cash-flow positive.
Of course, nowadays everyone has a toolbar and space in the browser is competitive landscape. MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others are all either upgrading their toolbars or creating toolbars for their brands. But with its white label offering that can now distribute brands more widely, Conduit may have found the opportunity to help companies cross-promote.
I would like to see someone building customized facebook style (bottom) application bar for publishers.
Now that you’ve mentioned it, someone will.
@Rohan, someone already built it: http://www.wibiya.com/
Their toolbars can be customized by publishers, and link into twitter, facebook, google translate, etc. Great review over at: http://thenextw...wibiya-invites/
I think, freecause.com could make concurency with them.. at least I hope so
but they monetize not from google, as I see..
sorry, didnt gave a link in prev.post: http://freecause.com
Freecause has Yahoo! not Google, and a lot of funny stuff was happening when I was shopping. Not so sure if thats a great idea. Conduit is clearly a PLATFORM… thats the advantage… I have three toolbars, and had no idea they were all powered by Conduit. Pretty cool
actually, conduit looks like malware to me.
uninstall is near impossible, hijacks the browser address bar. thats pretty much how they get 5 searches per user each month. just the URL typos.