Cheaters never prosper? Unless you do it online.
Do you want to have an affair? If so contactAshleyMadison.com, the premier "dating" website for aspiring adulterers. Type in the URL, and as the page loads a gauzy violet backdrop appears with a fuzzy image of a half-dressed couple going at it beyond a hotel doorway. "Join FREE & change your life today. Guaranteed!"
Setting up a profile costs nothing and takes about 12 seconds. First you check off your availability status: "attached male seeking females," "attached female seeking males," or, even though the concept of the site is that all users are in relationships and therefore equally invested in secrecy, "single female seeking males." Next you're asked for location, date of birth, height and weight, and whether you're looking for something "short term," "long term," "Cyber affair/Erotic Chat," "Whatever Excites Me," and so on
Once you provide an e-mail address that your spouse would presumably never have access to, you're thrust into Ashley Madison's low-tech pink and purple interface. And then, if you're a woman, the onslaught begins.
TDH071 ("Like foreign guys with accents?"): Hi, would u like to chat? I luv tall women!!
Needtotry2011 ("life is short, make it count!"): Hello!
Dirtybear2010 ("Seeking Ladies seeking NSA Discreet Fun"): Hello Red
There's a lone genius - possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial - behind Ashley Madison. His name is Noel Biderman, and he's the chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. "Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment," he declares. It's unclear if Biderman actually believes this - he's married and has two young kids - but like Hugh Hefner before him the business he has created pretty much requires that he say it. Behind his desk, in an office so lacking in embellishment it almost looks like a hastily assembled low-budget film set, is a large flat-screen monitor promoting his company's flagship brand. It reads: "Life is short. Have an affair."
Adultery has been good to Biderman, but defending his product is a full-time job Ashley Madison had blasted out a press release accusing Fox of refusing to broadcast its Super Bowl commercial Avid Life's offices were still crackling with outrage, with Biderman playing the role of the unfairly maligned business owner just trying to make an honest living. While Biderman scheduled calls with reporters from CNN, ESPN, and a Peterborough (Ont.) radio station called The Wolf to discuss the perceived injustice against his company, a film crew set up lights to shoot a segment for a documentary about the "science of sin." Down the hall, the 107 programmers, designers, customer service agents, and marketing folk who run Avid Life's six websites - including cougarlife.com, for older women seeking younger men, establishedmen.com, which connects "ambitious and attractive girls" with "successful and generous benefactors to fulfill their lifestyle needs," and hotornot.com, the 1990s throwback where people rate one another's photos - were plotting Avid Life's digital push into the future. "How could I not be angry?" Biderman, 39, asks of the Super Bowl affront.
One expects the guiding light of an operation such as his to be more like Joe Francis, the hard-partying creator of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, than Mitt Romney, but Biderman tends towards the latter: He wears a sports jacket and is preppy and well-built, with a tuft of hair at the tip of his forehead. Fox declined to comment on the Ashley Madison commercial. In any case, rejection is nothing new to Biderman, whose business has grown in part through the predictable media attention that's generated when a company that profits by encouraging people to cheat on their spouses tries to push further into the mainstream. "I think when a landscape is tilted against you like that...isn't that how women the generation before felt when they couldn't get a fair shake in jobs? Because of their gender?" Biderman continues. "It's the same thing. I'm angry because it's not logical."
After spending several years as a sports agent at Chicago's Interperformances, Biderman founded Ashley Madison in 2002, naming the company after the two most popular names for baby girls that year. A large chunk of his work as an agent involved helping professional basketball players juggle their wives and mistresses, so when he read somewhere that 30 percent of users of Internet dating services were pretending to be single when they weren't, a light went on, pointing the way to an underserved online niche market. What would happen, Biderman thought, if cheaters had a website all their own?
Biderman presented the idea to his business partner at the time, Darren Morgenstern. They tried to hold focus groups to figure out what philanderers would want in a website, but gave up, hired "a computer geek from Australia," and threw up a bare bones interface. From there, they came to better understand their customers, especially the reasons they were seeking affairs.
It's not easy to get a handle on the size of the fling economy. The Internet dating market is worth $1 billion to $1.5 billion in the U.S., according to industry website Online Dating Insider, and some portion of that, from 10 percent to 30 percent, depending on whom you ask, involves people who are already in relationships. Match.com and Facebook, as well as raunchier sites such as Adult FriendFinder, all had a piece of what Biderman was after; still, he essentially had to create a market for Ashley Madison, which is by far Avid Life's most successful brand. Craigslist, where much adulterous activity used to live, shut down its "adult services" section last year after it was accused of abetting sex trafficking and prostitution. The average number of daily visitors to Ashley Madison has grown 13 percent since then.
Avid Life is privately held, making its numbers difficult to verify, but according to the company, Ashley Madison has 8.5 million members, 1.3 million of whom have actually paid something. It now has a presence in 10 countries - the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, New Zealand, and Sweden - with plans to enter Italy, Spain, and Brazil in the next year. Not surprisingly, the majority of its users are men - an estimate on the site says there are seven of them for every three women. Based on internal projections, Avid Life is expected to generate $60 million in revenue this year and $20 million in profit. Almost all of that comes from Ashley Madison.
Promoting adultery and creating a market for it has made Biderman rich. It has not made him popular. "Nobody knows how many people are adulterous. But there is something important here," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist specializing in love and relationships who is also a consultant to the dating site Match.com. ". This guy is preying on human frailty. It's a little bit like pimping if he's making money." Still, "they certainly own that cheaters' market," said David Evans, publisher of Online Dating Insider. "What Ashley Madison does is legal. It's also illicit, in that it helps users violate their marriage vows and engage in deception and secrecy.
This presents enormous branding challenges as well as financial ones: How many fund managers want to go home to their wives and announce, "Honey, I found the perfect investment opportunity!" Some of Avid Life's employees don't publicly admit where they work for fear of jeopardizing their spouses' jobs, provoking family disapproval, or seeing their houses pelted with oranges; Biderman says he sometimes worries about his security. All of this puts him in a unique position: He is running a budding empire built on an activity that most people would say is wrong. Is that the easiest thing in the world or the most difficult?
Ashley Madison is what Biderman calls a "female-focused brand." Everything from the site's girly colors to the name is meant to entice those elusive XX chromosomes, the target of ladies' night two-for-one drink specials the world over. It was a particular dilemma, in this case, trying to appeal to the very demographic - married women - who were most likely to be disgusted by the nature of the goods being offered. "I was very confident that men would gravitate towards a service to conduct these otherwise anonymous affairs. They were seemingly doing it already," says Biderman. "I was much less confident that women would behave that way."
Just as Biderman predicted, Ashley Madison is drowning in husbands, so many that they threaten to crush the few venturesome ladies who have boldly - and perhaps recklessly - put themselves out there. Each time you log on as a female, it's as if a new batch of peanut butter packets has been dropped over a refugee camp - everyone leaps at them at once, and you are overwhelmed with messages, "winks," and men attempting to interact.
The pricing system is cleverly designed to charge the men at their most vulnerable moment: Each time one of those hungry males tries to grab at the peanut butter, he has to spend a few bucks. Creating a profile and browsing others are free, but if you'd like to initiate an e-mail or chat conversation with someone, you must purchase "credits" - 200 of them cost $79.00, and they run like a meter (e-mails after the first one cost nothing; charges appear ambiguously on your credit card bill).
Biderman says, is that it "makes people be a lot more thoughtful and selective with the messaging they send when they realize there is a toll." It also appears to be quite lucrative. Because no one in the history of Ashley Madison has ever heard of a female member having to initiate contact with a man, ladies effectively drink free.
Case in point: On a recent Saturday afternoon, three minutes after I logged on, the box at the top of my screen had filled with four attempts at correspondence. The queue quickly grew so long I couldn't keep track of it.
Research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20 to 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. Curiously, Australia, where Ashley Madison was launched in April 2010, has the highest proportion of women users, at almost 40 percent. Biderman spent a few weeks there and says he noticed that prostitution is legal and that Aussie women aren't happy about it. "I think women down there have a view of the world that men have all these playgrounds - brothels, strip clubs, massage parlors," he says, "and they have nothing." Biederman has spent so much time studying his users, he sounds like an amateur sociologist: "We know there's a lot of doctors on there with god complexes who clearly either deal with so much stress in their lives, or believe they're so important, that having an affair - they're entitled to it.".
While stress and cultural factors may drive use, looks apparently do not, at least for the men. "If you sat down with 20 people who'd had an affair and said, rate the person you had an affair with 'better looking' or 'worse looking' than your partner, almost 90 percent'll say worse," Biderman says. "You can build a profile right now of an unattractive woman, overweight, whatever, she'll still have a dozen men interested in meeting her." Either way, the pool of potential cheaters - and customers - is huge. It's quite lucrative and successful."
This website reminds me a bit of practicing criminal law. Lawyers profit from those who are accused of wrongdoing. But, there is a constitutional protection for those who are accused, not to those who have committed wrongdoing. There is no constitutional guarantee that protects cheating (unless you think the ) CIA is protected by the constitution.) Just like Mr. Biderman, many criminal lawyers are often taken to task for doing what we do (How can you represent those awful people) But lawyers (usually) are not the ones that violate the law .If everyone says "what goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas, then is it Ok to say "Cheat if you want" as long as no one finds out. I think not.
But with all that being said, There must be some grudging admiration out there .If that's what people want who are we to judge? I tell my wife all the time, you can't legislate morality. In my profession, I don't make moral judgments but I'm sure many would look at Mr. Biderman with disdain. But just like Hugh Hefner, I'm sure he is laughing all the way to the bank. That's it for now.
