Originally Posted by Forkbeard

The problem is one of symmetry, or the lack of it. There are a zillion programs, and I only have so much time and attention. For every direct or emergency contact one of these programs send me, they send fifty or a hundred marketing messages. The result is, the signals get lost in the noise, and I lose my motivation to keep the channel open because nothing of value ever seems to come in via that route.

I don't think anybody that's professional would dispute that programs need a reliable way to contact affiliates.

And, although there are notorious exceptions who send daily spam, I think most of the communications I get from programs are perfectly reasonable from the perspective of the program owner -- meaning, if I owned the program, I'd think it was a perfectly reasonable communication to send.

What program owners and affiliate reps do not appear to understand is that it's completely impossible to keep track of "perfectly reasonable" emails from a couple of hundred different programs, which is probably a fair estimate of the number I've signed up with for one reason or another since 2002.

Sure, I'd "like" for each of those programs to be able to contact me when it's to my interest, but the work involved in keeping those emails up to date, filtering all the "here are your galleries for the week" messages, whitelisting the programs I trust, and somehow still getting the "real" messages that aren't automated mailings could easily add up to many unpaid hours spent every week. It's a matter of scale.

At the end of the day, there are maybe half a dozen affiliate managers that I keep in close contact with, and the rest have a shot (if they choose carefully their subject line) in getting noticed among all the program spam that I delete every day. I'd like to do better, but nobody's paying me and (as a rule) the programs are not careful enough about limiting their own spam, so it makes things very difficult to keep a clear channel of communication open without getting overwhelmed by spam.

Any *specific* affiliate manager who wants my attention can probably get it with enough persistence, and if they have value to offer sufficient to justify my effort in keeping the channel open and clear, they can probably keep it. But for all affiliate managers to expect me to keep those channels open and clear for all of them, just so they can abuse that trust by sending me daily and weekly gallery listings I could find on their website at need? Naw. Ain't gonna happen. I got better things to do.