Just to be clear, I am not referring to my sites or my links or my promotions..

The question arises as I see some rather diverse, and presumably large revenue companies that have a large following of affiliate webmasters promoting their sites, even though some of their sites are blatant fraud........and the webmasters are linking to the falsely advertised site...so they aren't just choosing the ones on the up and up.

I see this most often in companies that try to capture all niches for traffic purposes, buy a minor amount of content for that niche, then feed that traffic and join to a generic members area. The retention of members ratio on these sites surely has to be low, so why do webmasters still promote them? Some of them are PPS sites, and some are partnership programs...
so it's not about the immediate payout....

Do affiliate webmasters not request to check out the members area of a site they are going to promote to ascertain if the site will potentially retain, and also if the site tour is promoting the content of the actual members area?

Just my musings...