Some of my observations:
There are a few programs which are closed to new affiliates, or open by invitation only. This is often misunderstood to mean “we only want big affiliates”. Some travel programs are notorious for this – if you don’t have half a million views a month they don’t want you.
On the other hand, one can also understand why they don’t just let everyone join – because then you get those that try to sign up as an aff, become the only player under their account and thus get a 25% rebate on losses. Or those who just sign up and then spam every forum or create banner farms and drive crap traffic to those one-page sites.
What a good affiliate manager will look for is *potential*. Some small affiliate may not be making much, but clearly is putting in the effort and perhaps needs a little guidance here or there before their revenue leaps dramatically.
Satya’s made some very good points in his post – very interesting reading. But I think we need to step back from the classification “big or small”. Superaffiliates can turn you off just as quickly as a small affiliate can – to put all your eggs into a few baskets is nothing but dangerous… as most aff managers in this thread have observed, they try to work with all affiliates equally but at some point they must be able to pick and choose who to pay more attention to in order to help them grow.