Many commercial web sites use current news and other similar rapidly-changing items to respond to users' demands for new material. Quite simply, users stop visiting a site if they perceive that its information is "stale" or uninteresting.

Information consolidators act as middlemen, gathering multimedia information from diverse sources and delivering it to the client web servers. The consolidators can tailor the information provided to fit the unique profile of each of its commercial clients. Meanwhile, the consolidator provides royalty payments to the authors of the individual new items. The consolidator remains invisible to end users, as all pages bear the logo of the commercial web server.

Here are some information consolidators:

• ScreamingMedia represents 2800 publishers to about 1100 web sites. (cite)
• iSyndicate represents about 1200 publishers to about 270,000 web sites. (cite) In August, 2001, iSyndicate was acquired by YellowBrix.com a competing information consolidator.