In reply to Michael.

I'm not saying that promotion or upselling is invalid, necessarily. What annoys me is when you use the directories solely for promotion in the first place. When you think of it as being an advertising model from the start, then that diminishes the directory as a whole. Too often I see people putting stuff in specifically to advertise.

What's funny is that 90% of the time they're not even good at it. I have lost count of the number of plugins we've had submitted that are a) slightly modified copies of somebody else's plugin, b) have the original author credits removed, c) have zero new features, and d) have added advertising to point users back to the thief's own site in some manner. This has happened *thousands* of times. It's not even a rare occurrence anymore.

So, yeah, okay, maybe I'm a bit jaded on the topic. I see plugins with lots of upsell and "premium" marketing copy in them as kinda spammy. Mostly because we get a hell of a lot of actual spam doing exactly the same types of things.

I'm not arguing that this sort of thing can't be done right and tastefully. I'm arguing that it usually isn't.