With 250 million MAUs, Adam Boyden highlights the value of Conduit's omni-platform for user engagement

As the time spent on mobile content grows ever longer, the sector is starting to encroach onto what could be called the traditional online browser activity.

In turn, this has resulted in the migration of companies who provide online services - portals, analytics, payment, A/B testing etc - to mobile.

One such is user engagement outfit Conduit, which through its browser toolbar community has built up a strong distribution business for media companies including game publishers such as Zynga, Playfish, Bigpoint and Spil Games.

"We help anyone who's operating online with content," explains president Adam Boyden.

"We're all about helping you manage the relationship with your consumers."

Throwback, boomerang

Still, it may seem that the toolbar add-on business is something that should have died out in the early 2000s.

Companies such as Conduit have extensive experience on how to get and keep users within their ecosystem, however, and that's valuable for every platform.

In this respect, it operates in a similar way to mobile monetisation companies such as Tapjoy, Chartboost and W3i, the latter also starting out in the PC distribution business before switching to mobile.

Perhaps it shouldn't work so well in the era of app stores, but while app stores continue to fail when it comes to app discovery, such service providers have a big role to play.

"When it comes to games, there's a huge drop off of users within two days of installing your app," Boyden says, pointing out that as well as distribution, Conduit's relationship extends well beyond the initial download or install.

"Anything that can be done to reduce that churn is vital," he argues.

How big?

As a browser-based business, one advantage Conduit has is that users are always 'logged in', enabling the company generates vast amounts of statistics. Boyden is keen to stress these are anonymous. "We don't follow people around," he says.

Hence it can incentivise users and players to try new games or encourage them to complete the next tasks in the ones they've already started.

And then there's the issue of scale.

Across its platform, Conduit has over 260,000 content partners, including NBC, Groupon, Time Warner Cable, Major League Baseball, Stardoll, Liverpool FC and FC Barcelona, and over 250 million monthly active users.

Throw in the company's new push in terms of rolling out its own mobile marketplace for app distribution - and enabling companies to create and publish apps (albeit not yet complex games) on app stores - and its position in the value chain becomes much clearer.

Same question, new audience

As this has always been valuable in online, so Boyden expects it to be valuable in mobile. He doesn't think that mobile is radically different to the PC browser business on which Conduit built its reputation.

"For us, the question has always been, how can we add value for our publishers?" he explains.

So while technologies such as HTML5 might provide interesting use cases for some of its partners, he doesn't expect it to provide beyond previous 'nirvana technologies' such as Java, Silverlight or Flash.

Instead, the future for Conduit is more generally about becoming bigger and better.

"We'll continue to increase the number of users and publishers, while ensure our platform works for all hardware and software," Boyden says.

"That's not easy thing. We've cracked desktop, and have a good foot in mobile, and now have smart TV in our sights. There's plenty of work still to do."

You can find out more about Conduit's mobile app play here and more general company information here.