Some companies seem to at least take some time to approve new affiliate accounts. During early pandemic years, many new account submissions went unnoticed. A quick ping via email usually jogged an authorization.
Some of the most established niche sites seem to have their fill of "enough" affiliate and they "close" submissions all together.
My pet peeve has to do with sponsors who look solely at actual sales by an affiliate, and not years of work, writing original reviews, posting their hosted galleries, and providing a search engine path through to the sponsor's sites. Their hosted galleries are usually very leaky and there are plenty of links from my sites/traffic sources, thru their unaffiliated links that they get value from, but the affiliate does not.
Even though search engines don't always give cred for "nofollow", they do pay attention and the sponsor's site still benefit SE juice from "no sale affiliates".
It's disappointing to spend several years building multiple links to the sponsor, with rich text, only to have your account, "expire".
In some cases, they still take your traffic to their join page.
I have always been able to email the sponsor and let them know I'm active, and so far, they always reactivate. It makes me weary though about investing more time in those sponsors who have a habit of doing arbitrary purges.
Affiliates send more than just direct sales to sponsors.
