For the subscribing sites, syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to their pages, making them more attractive to users.
This generates new traffic for the provider site—making syndication an easy and relatively cheap, or even free, form of advertisement.
Content syndication has become an effective strategy for link building, as search engine optimization has become an increasingly important topic among website owners and online marketers.
Syndication first arose in earlier media such as print, radio, and television, allowing content creators to reach a wider audience.
In the case of radio, the United States Federal government proposed a syndicate in 1924 so that the country's executives could quickly and efficiently reach the entire population.
[4] One predecessor of web syndication is the Meta Content Framework (MCF), developed in 1996 by Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group.
With full content, the entire content—which might be text, audio, video, applications/widgets, or user-generated content—appears unaltered on the publisher's site.
The content creator can hand-pick syndication partners based on specific criteria, such as the size or quality of their audiences.
Web syndication has been used to distribute product content such as feature descriptions, images, and specifications.