Conduit toolbar

» see conduit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

You did not install the Conduit toolbar. You agreed to it, quickly, on the third screen of an installer for something else, where a checkbox was already ticked and the button underneath said Next. Afterwards your search box belonged to somebody, your home page had moved, and getting rid of it took longer than installing whatever you had actually gone looking for.

Underneath the reputation there was a real platform with real customers. Conduit let any web publisher build a custom toolbar at no cost, and by the end it had somewhere around 260,000 registered publishers whose toolbars had been downloaded by more than 250 million people. Major League Baseball had one. So did Greenpeace. The toolbars ran in Internet Explorer and Firefox, with Chrome support added in 2011, and the searches typed into them were served by Bing, which is how the money worked: the publisher got a cut, Conduit got a cut, and Microsoft got a search query it would otherwise never have seen.

This is a part of the era I did meet, though not on purpose. If you are the computer engineer in a Turkish family you eventually become the person the laptops get brought to, and from roughly 2010 onward a large share of what was wrong with those laptops was a toolbar somebody had agreed to without noticing. I could not tell you whether the ones I took off were Conduit's specifically. There were several vendors and they all looked identical by the time they were on the screen, which was less an accident than a strategy.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it got on your machine ~

The distribution model was piggyback installation. The toolbar rode along with another software product, and users were technically given the option not to install it, in the sense that the option was on the screen. TechCrunch counted 250,000 app publishers and 170 million users in July 2010. In the same period Fortune reported that more than 100 million Conduit-powered toolbars were being used at least once a month, and that this put Conduit at number 29 on Google's list of the top thousand sites on the internet that year, which is a strange place to find a company whose product was something you had to be tricked into.

The technical verdict was less generous than the traffic numbers. Antivirus vendors classified it as a potentially unwanted program and a browser hijacker, with documented capabilities for changing browser settings and for hiding itself from removal. Norton published its own instructions for uninstalling Search Protect by Conduit in July 2014, six months after Conduit had already left the business. The most consistent complaint across every source is not that the toolbar did anything catastrophic. It is that it was extremely difficult to remove.

~ download valley ~

Conduit was founded in 2005 by Ronen Shilo with two co-founders, and it belonged to the Israeli software cluster that the press had started calling Download Valley: a group of companies whose entire business was monetizing free software downloads by attaching advertising to them. It had more than 400 employees by 2013 and offices in New York and London. This was not a basement operation. It was a well-capitalized company doing something that every security vendor in the world had decided was a problem.

The clearest single sign that Conduit knew where the category was going came in October 2013, when it announced it was discontinuing Wibiya. It had bought Wibiya in May 2011 for $45 million and shut it down two and a half years later without recovering anything visible from the purchase, because by then the whole toolbar shape was over and there was no point in owning a nicer version of it.

~ the reverse merger ~

On 16 September 2013 Conduit announced it would spin its ClientConnect division into Perion Network through a reverse merger, and the reported valuations do not agree with each other in any useful way. TechCrunch headlined Conduit as worth $1.4 billion against Perion's $153 million. Wikipedia puts Conduit at $1.5 billion in late 2013. Haaretz headed its story on the combined entity at $800 million, and the acquisition trackers record the all-stock transaction itself at $660 million. They are measuring different objects and none of them says so.

Perion's shareholders met on 18 November 2013 and the merger completed on 2 January 2014, with Conduit's shareholders ending up holding 81 percent of Perion's existing shares. The combined business reported $367 million of revenue and $109 million of EBITDA for the twelve months to 30 June 2013, and the sheer size of the inherited user base pushed Perion past AOL in US search volume immediately. Then Google banned third-party toolbars from Chrome outright and put a stop to the default-search resets the entire model depended on, and the asset Perion had just paid for started evaporating. conduit.com answers nothing over plain http or https today.

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