Originally Posted by Tempest

You yourself said that you spend hours post processing your photos to give the customer the best quality you can... Affiliates do the same thing except that we crop/resize an image in order to get the surfer "hot" so that he clicks the link to your site and garners everyone some cash... You deliver a final product to your customers... Affiliates deliver content as a promotional means to get you the customers. The mind set between what your customers would like and what's required to entice a surfer to click through are two different animals. Your expertise is in creating a high quality end product. Affiliate expertise in converting a free loading surfer into a paying member.

When we're cropping an image we're trying to take just the absolute best part of an image and use that to promote the site. We look at that image in terms of how enticing we can make a single image to the surfer. In order to do that, and include your watermark, we'd have to add it back in after the fact which is too much work for the amount of promotional posts/pages etc. we have to make in order to generate traffic. What you're telling your affiliates to do is just take your image, resize it and use it as is. That's simply not as effective as making something that's "optimized" to sell.