Twenty years ago, at a San Francisco nightclub called Bimbos, the first Webby Awards ceremony was held. It had 15 categories, such as Travel, Games, Music, & “Weird.” It was quaint. It was funky. It was what the internet was like back then.

Fast forward to this week when the latest Webby Award winners were announced, and there are over 200 categories with “Winners”, “People’s Choice Awards” and “Honorees” for each category. And yes, the Weird category shows up in a few verticals still, with Clickhole and People Walker winning… but I digress.

In 2013, “Email Newsletters” was added as a new category. That year, Artspace took home the award with Now I Know as People’s Choice. It was a fun time to be in the email industry. We had arrived. Oracle bought Responsys for $1.5 billion. People were talking about how email was going to be the next big thing. (Funny how just a couple years later everyone was saying it was dead — but I digress again.)

As I go back the last few years for nominees of the Email Newsletter category, though, something stands out to me. These emails aren’t that great.

Sure, the information inside the emails are good-enough, but you can get that from a blog post or another category like News. When it comes to design, strategy, forward-thinking technology, etc, none of these really check the box. Plus, Refinery29 seems to be mentioned every single year and little changes have been made since the first time they showed up in 2014. Hell, this year it looks like they just threw a few emails on a Tumblr page together quickly so they could get nominated again.

Wait, that is exactly what they did… and they got nominated again:

Refinery29 used a tumblr page as their submission, with images of their emails that they sent in 2016.

Where are all the entries worth talking about?

It seems that there are a lot of reasons we haven’t seen a better selection of emails awarded over the years. Here are just some ideas:

The best emailers don’t know that the Webby Awards have an Email Newsletter category Brands don’t want to pay the entry fee to be nominated The awards committee is playing favorites with their top choices People don’t care about awards anymore

Back to 2013, I remember when everyone was talking about The Skimm. They didn’t make it as a nominee then. In 2016 I couldn’t get away from people talking about Chubbies emails. They didn’t make it as a nominee either.

Besides running a site that is dedicated to really good emails (hence the unoriginal name of our site), we wanted a way to show off the cream of the crop. It seems like people should be recognized for their hard work, especially when it is inspiring.

So, a few months ago we put together some criteria. We gathered up our top categories that had been viewed in the past year, and then ranked the emails within those categories. The biggest weight for the rankings was total views compared to others in the category, but we also looked at inbound traffic, time on site, comments, and other emails that the brand had put out. We called it the Unspammy Awards and even went to Emma’s Headquarters in Nashville to announce them.

Here are those again below if you are curious. But my question about having an email award is still pending. What can emailers do to get more credit for their hard work that touches million of people each day — work that is proven to be the most effective marketing channel in terms of ROI for a company?

Until then, we’ll continue to gather the best emails in our inboxes and share them around the internet.