No. Affiliate sales is just a basic "every sale you send my way, you make some money" arrangement, different only from traditional commissioned sales in that the affiliates usually don't work "directly" for the company selling the product.

Multi level marketing (MLM) schemes are situations in which people make money, or are promised money, based on their ability to recruit additional affiliate salespeople. The typical MLM pitch is "if you sell product X, we'll give you a (typically huge) sum of money, and also if you convince someone else to enter into this same agreement, we'll give you a different (usually smaller) sum of money, and what's more you'll get money for every sale that recruit makes, any people they recruit, and any sales they make, recursively on down the tree."

The con is usually in the fact that product X is difficult née impossible to sell, and that entering into such an agreement in the first place requires payment into the scheme. Those factors result in the people towards the "root" of the tree making tons of money simply from the fact that more people are getting recruited and paying in at lower levels. They make money from the tree growing, even though the leaves are not making sales.

This is widely considered unethical (and illegal, in some cases) since its primary profit engine is recruitment under usually-false pretenses. MLM can be practiced ethically between a given two parties, but usually only makes money due to subsequent unethical practices (e.g. one seasoned affiliate marketeer agrees to be a recruit of another such seasoned salesperson in a multilevel scheme, knowing full well the behavior of the scheme; they then both go on to enrich themselves and each other by shilling unsuspecting rubes with the typical "you can work your own hours, get tons of money, and, if you grow your network big enough, rake in the cash while your recruits do all the hard work!" sell concealing the "...for a nominal [signup|monthly|etc] fee" hook).

Edit: removed accidentally repeated repeated words.

Great reply. Thank you very much!

>based on their ability to recruit additional affiliate salespeople

If Casper took owership of every outstanding matress review website there is and ever will be (or made some of their own in the pocess and have it high ranked, whichever is the cheapest form of tactics), affiliation would never be an issue. Wouldn't be ethic, but eh...

It's more like a salesman making a commission for recommending or selling someone else's product.

Specifically, if sales = Sales Dev Rep + Closer, then affiliate sites (leadgen) is like outsourcing the SDR and them getting a commission or referral fee.