Conduit's long-tail toolbar strategy

Two-year-old Conduit, which provides toolbars for large organizations, like Discovery Channel and Major League Baseball, down to blogs, like VentureBeat, just launched a new toolbar that combines some of the top bloggers in an all-in-one toolbar, called "allmyblogs." The bloggers include VentureBeat, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Mashable, and others, including Vator.tv, even though we're more than a blog, we're also a social network. The toolbar is actually pretty useful. Recently, I created one for Vator.tv. (Check out the Vator.tv toolbar), and I have found myself using the search box often. This is a great thing for Conduit as the company has a partnership with Google. Google shares revenue with Conduit for all the searches coming from Conduit's toolbars. According to Reena Jadhav, Conduit's searches just reached over 25 million searches per month. They reached that by having 130,000 publishers as channel partners. So, how many people really download toolbars? Reena tells me that at least one publisher of cycling news saw 82% of its audience base download the toolbar in order to listen to a particular race on the radio. What's the lesson hear? Put a major event on the toolbar and tell your audience that they can't get access to it unless they download the toolbar. Now, whether that means the audience will continue to use it is another question. But it's not a bad promotional gimmick for the publishing site, as well as Conduit. This video pitch is of Reena sharing more about Conduit.