Web Syndication

Web syndication is a process that allows for greater access to web content via agreements between organizations. To really explain how this works, let’s TARDIS ourselves back to 1956, when the world was forever changed by the birth of a newspaper column called “Dear Abby.”

“Dear Abby” is an advice column; people write in from all over the place with questions about love, life, and the pursuit of happiness. “Abby,” who was originally a woman named Pauline Phillips, but is now—fun fact—her daughter Jeanne, offers the advice-seekers, and the newspaper’s readers, recommendations on what to do and how to do it.

This column started out in the San Francisco Chronicle, but today, it’s published in over a thousand newspapers all over the world. In other words, the column is syndicated: one entity creates the content and other entities publish it.

Web syndication works the same way, but with the internet instead of newspapers. It’s usually a win-win for the content’s creators and publishers; the creators (like Dear Abby) get their stuff out to a wider audience, and the publishers (like those 1,000+ newspapers) get to host the content that their subscribers want to read.

Web syndication doesn’t only help budding advice columnists, though; it can help retailers market their products on other websites. It can help sports sites keep their NCAA March Madness scores updating in real time. It can allow day traders to see how the Dow, NASDAQ, and gold markets are doing from the comfort of their own financial portal.

So maybe web syndication is actually a win-win-win: the content creators get greater visibility, the content publishers attract more web traffic, and we the content users don’t have to spend all day clicking around to get the info we crave.