Definition: The term affiliate is used to describe the relationship between two companies in which one owns a substantial, but not controlling, amount of the voting stock. It can also mean when two companies are both subsidiaries of a third company.
Since the rise of the Internet, affiliate has more often been used to denote a business arrangement between two companies in which one is paid a cut of a sale in exchange for putting advertisements or links for a product on his or her website. In fact, some owners of popular blogs and sites can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through affiliate income by simply pointing to the shopping sites of other businesses.
