Many publishers are in the same situation. They have great content, but they don’t have a big audience. Other sites have a huge audience, and those sites want the publishers’ content. Is it a match made in heaven?

It depends. You have to look at the terms of the deal, and you have to think long and hard about your strategy.

(Note that I’m not talking about the pond-scum aggregators who steal other people’s content and sell ads against it. I’m talking about reputable businesses that deal honestly with publishers.)

Is it a good idea for publishers to participate with these aggregators? How will that decision affect publisher revenue?

Flipboard has been in this business for a while. Facebook joined a few months ago, and Apple has an app called News to be released with iOS 9. Google and others are in this space as well. All of them have their own terms and ways they want to win — to be the default place where people go to see and share content.

There’s no doubting the convenience for the user of having content in one place — that is, getting content through an intermediary and avoiding direct contact with the publisher.

But is that what you, as a publisher, want? I don’t think there’s a clear answer yet, but here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week as I’ve read stories on this topic.

Will you lose your brand?

When somebody visits your site, they see your font, your colors, your logo and your design. You craft that experience to match with your brand expectations, and it helps people identify with you as a reputable source.

When your content goes into somebody else’s news service, you have far less control. Maybe none at all.

Are you effectively becoming a ghost writer, providing words for somebody else? When people read your content on Flipboard, do they remember you, or do they remember Flipboard?

If part of your strategy for providing content online is to establish a relationship with new prospects, will it help you when your content is in that environment?

Here’s a test. Go spend 15 minutes on Flipboard, and then ask yourself if you remember the publishers of the content you read.

Is it your world, or the readers’ world?

These services specialize in customizing content for the reader’s interests, which means your content is being served in an environment you don’t control.

That’s unavoidable to a certain extent. Nothing prevents users from clipping your content into Evernote, or sharing it on Facebook, or doing any number of things. So to some extent publishers just need to face the fact that it’s a new world and they don’t control the context of their content. Unless they go with a full paywall.

But it’s still something to think about, since each service will do things slightly differently.

Will you be a small fish in a big pond?

If you’re The New York Times, the aggregator will give you a lot of attention, make concessions and generally try to work with you. But if you’re a small fish, will you get lost in the crowd?

How will this affect your relationship with your audience and your advertisers?

Advertisers want to buy audience. If you hand over your content to an aggregator, you lose control over the audience, and you lose control of the relationship with the advertiser.

Publishers want to build a relationship with an audience. If a majority of the content is being consumed elsewhere — out of the publisher’s control — how can the publisher maintain that relationship?

If the aggregators get control of the market, will they change the rules?

If too many publishers take the bait and start providing content through the aggregators, what will stop the aggregators from squeezing the publishers over price? Won’t this become a race to the bottom, where your hard-won brand reputation becomes irrelevant in a world where small start-ups are eager to beat you?

Some publishers think they were foolish, back in the early days of the Internet, to post content online and monetize it with ads. Is it time to stop that process?

I welcome your comments and suggestions. I don’t have the answer to all these things, but I do suspect that this is yet another way that publishers are being taken to the cleaners.