Conduit’s Browser Toolbars Serve Up Web Sites To Go
Posted on June 23, 2009 |
I've never been a big fan of toolbars, those strips just above the Web page on your Web browser where search engines and others place a series of buttons to reach their services quickly. For awhile, I had three or four from eBay, Google, Yahoo, and others, but I rarely used most of them, and finally uninstalled them to clear out the clutter.
Apparently a heck of a lot of people still use them, though: A startup called Conduit has made a profitable business out of helping 200,000 Web publishers and businesses--mostly small (like the Pretentious Pooch pet store in Baltimore), many overseas, but some large ones like Major League Baseball--offer them to some 60 million active users. The publishers like them because they can essentially syndicate their Web sites right onto people's browsers. That way, the publishers have a better chance to get people coming back to their sites to use their various services--that is, if they can get past the reservations of people like me.
(To get a taste of what the toolbars look like, here's the promo for Major League Baseball's toolbar, and here's TechCrunch's, as well as a gallery of many others.)
Now, Conduit, which lets publishers create custom toolbars, is looking to blow open toolbars so that they may become more attractive both to publishers (and maybe to me).
