Posted on 02/14/2011 12:38:05 PM PST by wmfights
“Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment.” That is the declaration of Noel Biderman, a Toronto businessman who wants to sell you an adulterous affair. As the current cover story of Bloomberg Businessweek reveals, Mr. Biderman is doing a great deal of business.
The magazine describes AshleyMadison.com as “the premier ‘dating’ website for aspiring adulterers.” Biderman says he came up with the idea after serving as an agent for professional athletes. That job required him to negotiate around the adulterous affairs of his clients. Biderman came to the conclusion that adultery could be big business.
Now, Ashley Madison grosses $60 million in yearly revenue and produces $20 million in annual profits. Biderman himself is making millions of dollars a year, and adultery appears to be a growth industry.
The idea behind Ashley Madison is easy enough to understand. Biderman’s plan was to create a website that would appear to cater to women seeking an adulterous partner, while actually attracting men seeking the women for an adulterous liaison. Clients of the site establish a personal profile, check off their “availability status,” and mark their personal preferences. The real money flows to the site when men connect online with women and then have to pay rather steep fees for the privilege of continuing the conversation. If all goes according to plan, adultery soon follows.
Businessweek’s reporter, Sheelah Kolhatkar, describes Noel Biderman as “a lone genius — possibly evil and certainly entrepreneurial.” He serves as chief executive officer of Avid Life Media, the parent company for Ashley Madison. He is also the married father of two young children. In his office the computer monitor flashes his company’s promotional message: “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Biderman’s wife, Amanda, seems unconcerned about both the business and her husband’s chosen role as the captain of the adultery industry. In a statement of almost complete moral evasion, she says: “Really, the business itself doesn’t match who he is as a person — it’s not our lifestyle or value system or any of that.” Well, here’s a clue: if you conceive, establish, and run the business, it is your value system. When “Life is short. Have an affair.” is your motto, adultery is “who you are as a person,” even if you never have an actual affair.
She went on: “I mean, yeah, I’d love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it’s a business, and that’s how we look at it.”
The same could be said for a house of prostitution, of course, and at least some observers suggest that prostitution is basically what Ashley Madison is all about. After all, though almost all of the men registered at the site are married, about 20 percent of the women are not.
Interestingly, since adultery has now been transformed into a major business, certain metrics become available. Reporter Sheelah Kolhatkar explains that 20-40 percent of heterosexual married men and 20-25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. She cites University of New Hampshire economist Bruce Elmslie, who claims that men and women commit adultery at about the same rates until the ages of 35 or 40. After that, women are more reluctant to have an affair, and the men surge on.
Biderman explains that women are most likely to have an affair in the workplace with a “work husband” or with the husband of a friend. Men commit adultery under a far wider range of circumstances. Ashley Madison is “drowning in husbands,” Biderman reports.
Biderman launched the site in 2010, but he founded the company back in 2002. He named it Ashley Madison by combining the two most popular names for baby girls that year. He claims just to be meeting a need and rejects the idea that he is actually expanding the numbers of affairs. Nevertheless, anthropologist Helen Fisher accuses Biderman of “preying on human frailty.”
At least in economic terms, Biderman’s idea is paying handsomely. Ashley Madison has already made him a millionaire several times over. David Evans, publisher of Online Dating Insider, remarked that Biderman and his company “certainly own that cheaters’ market.” He added, “It’s quite lucrative and successful.”
Amazingly enough, Biderman actually complains that his business is the target of discrimination. After all, Fox turned down his proposed Super Bowl commercial. As a matter of fact, Biderman seems to complain rather constantly about the opposition his company engenders. On the other hand, some suspect that he is also fueling the opposition, stirring up his own publicity.
Sheelah Kolhatkar describes the company in these terms:
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!”
It is hard to imagine how this company and its founder would not face “enormous branding challenges.” With understatement, Kolhatkar expresses the obvious: “He is running a budding empire built on an activity that most people would say is wrong.”
That last statement is revealing in more than one sense. It does seem that most people believe that adultery is wrong. Even so, it is rampant. It seems that many human beings will abandon their moral principles when faced with the opportunity to commit adultery. Ashley Madison exists to create even more of those opportunities.
It undoubtedly says a great deal that Bloomberg Businessweek chose this topic for its Valentine’s Day cover story. Why did they run a cover article on a man who declares, “Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment”? Does this represent the magazine’s agreement with Mrs. Biderman when she says, “…it’s a business, and that’s how we look at it”?
Both. My initial reaction was based on a couple of scandals that shut down some of Match.com’s competitors several years back, ie paid female employees posing as potential dates. Then just a couple hours worth of research turned up similarities to striking to ignore:
Pay to contact
Pay to receive messages
Pay to chat
Pay to send virtual baubles
Pay to send flirts (whatever those are)
Pay to see who sent you a flirt
Pay to send winks
Pay to see who winked at you
Then AM takes it a step further by owning/running pseudo sites like ashleymadisonscam.net. that leads the searcher into believing he’s reading third party information, but it’s really a commercial for AM.
Same for Ashleymadison.org, ashleymadisonsucks.com, ashleymadisonreviews.net, ashleymadisoncheating.com, ashleymadisonsucks.info, etc etc.
All use varying methods of deception, from guys who said the site doesn’t work, only to find out they still had credits and SCORE...to wives lamenting that they lost their husbands to AM...and just when you’re ready to shed that tear tell you how they got themselves back into shape and now they’re looking for hot married guys on AM too.
In short, they bought the first 6 or so search engine pages to keep the poor saps from uncovering the truth. I had to search with some legalese to find the following disclaimer which exists as their legal protection against fraud. It also confirms my theory my satisfaction.
From time to time this service may include, offer, or initiate winks, collect messages or instant chat from Market Researchers (Online Hosts) simulating attached or single men or women. These efforts are conducted for market research and/or customer experience and/or quality control and/or compliance purposes.
So, they’re admitting it in the fine print hoping that no one will ever notice.
I think Melas just proved why Freepers are smarter and better investigative reporters than professional journalists!
Great job, Melas!
Couldn’t be that it costs a lot of money to pay the gals who’re baiting the guys to spend more on the service could it?
Thank you. I admit it, I work in the bicycle industry, so I have nothing but time to kill in February.
That makes sense, phonebanks and billing services too. Also, I’m assuming “upstreams”.
Explain. I would have thought bars would be a far more likely place. At least that’s where the affairs I’ve actually heard about in real life started.
safe assumption.
LMAO and thinking he's there for the employee discount.
I don’t know anything about this particular enterprise, but online dating sites in general have been accused of hiring fluffers—women who aren’t really interested in anything but play the role to keep the men spending money.
Common sense tells me that if AM was actually facilitating affairs, they’d go broke. No, my money says that they string these suckers along for a very long and very expensive ride.
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This seems like high rolling idiocy for people who not only want to cheat, but want to do so while living on the edge.
What a sick man.
There is no sucker like a socially inept male. Internet dating sites have been preying on them for years. The only difference here is that wink-wink you don’t have to lie and pretend to be single to be bilked out of your paycheck. It’s really sad.
Fascinating research and analysis. Help yourself to a Guinness and a kitten!
Personal experience, myself and several of my friends. In my job, we often spend more time with our co-workers than with our spouses during the week. I see a lot of “emotional infidelity,” aka crying on the shoulders of the opposite sex. That will do it every time.
No thrashing from me.
"Amandas" are the perfect type of wives for men who want to fool around... A secondary business might be to help men find the perfect 'amanda" ...
Thank you for making my point so brilliantly. Talk about stepping on your own land mine!
I may get thrashed for saying this...
No need to worry about this phrase, honestly, it’s true. Hopefully this guy confesses and turns his life around before he has to meet the highest judge there is, because hell is a rotten place, as we all know.
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