Traditionally, JVs or Joint Venture Partners, simply referred to people who came together to cooperate and share in a business venture. Today, especially in the Internet Marketing (IM) world, it means something a little different. "JV" has become shorthand for "affiliate", or someone who sends traffic to your offer and is paid a commission for each sale they make. Frankly, this has caused a little confusion because, even in IM, you can still have a JV partnership in the traditional sense. For example, if you have a video course and ebook you created, but no skills or means for getting it online, you could partner with someone who will do the web design and development and split profits 50/50. The fact that those two JV partners will usually start recruiting "affiliates" to drive traffic to their product while calling those affiliates "JVs" makes things even more confusing, especially when you consider that those two JV partners split profits AFTER payouts are first made to "their JVs" (affiliates). This happens all the time in IM and so it's difficult to know what a person means when they say "would you like to be my JV?". But today, for whatever reason, 9 times out of 10 a person simply means affiliate. Frankly, conflating the terms was a horrible mistake on the part of the IM community.