BUSINESS WEEK – Feb 14 – Noel Biderman is the CEO of Avid Life Media, based in Toronto. "Monogamy, in my opinion, is a failed experiment," he declares. Adultery has been good to Biderman, but defending his product is a full-time job. 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. AshleyMadison is by far Avid Life's most successful brand with 8.5M members, 1.3 million of whom have actually paid something. Avid Life is expected to generate $60M in revenue this year and $20M in profit. Biderman is quick to explain why his business isn't hurting anyone. "You eradicate Ashley Madison, you're not going to eradicate infidelity.Do you think if you stop allowing divorce attorneys to advertise, we would stop people from getting divorced?" he says. According to Justin Wolfers, an economist, Ashley Madison provides liquidity to an illiquid market, which may make the market bigger. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK
Category: AshleyMadison
Ashley Madison: Lessons In Promoting A Sleazy Business
FORBES – Feb 11 – Ashley Madison, the Match.com for adulterers with 8.5M users globally, is owned by Avid Life. Avid Life had $60M in revenue this year and $20M in profit, almost all of it from Ashley Madison. The site made a stink this year about its ads being banned during the Superbowl, as it has in previous years. One way the company may have gotten around this in the past is through guerilla advertising: slyly placing ads inside anti-Ashley Madison campaigns, like MyMarriageMatters.org — a marriage promotion website run by a divorce lawyer. One monogamy-supporting blogger traced an email address affiliated with the site back to Avid Life. This Marriage Matters ad arguably does more to show off Ashley Madison than to promote the sanctity of marriage. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES
Noel Biderman, CEO Of AshleyMadison.com – Changing The Face Of Matrimony
BENZINGA – Feb 9 – Ashley Madison, a controversial dating site that was launched in 2001, has received heavy criticism over its premise. The site serves as a platform for married persons to engage in marital infidelity.
Q: What drove your decision to foray into this world?
A: More and more people who were already in relationships took advantage started joining dating sites. My paradigm was, why not build a social network of their own where these married people could connect with one another, as opposed to having to pose as something they weren't.
Q: One of the statements you've made is that your commercial in a 30-second spot is not going to convince anyone to cheat. But what about those that would shy away from starting an affair in the workplace?
A: We can't create prohibition. It fails every time that we do so. I'm part of the landscape that says, “Let people be who they want to be and pursue what they want to pursue.”
Q: So is it a question of cannibalizing this behavior, like you say, and putting it in a place where it's not affecting other people? Or is your stance closer to your previous comments, in which you said this can actually help a marriage?
A: Ashley Madison is not some kind of home-wrecking service. Some people are looking to pursue something outside of their relationship to preserve their primary relationship.
Q: Describe the growth trajectory of Ashley Madison over the past few years?
A: Our site has gone from 800,000 to 900,000 users to 7.8M users in the span of the last two and a half to three years.
Q: You had an IPO in the works back in February. Why was that put on hold?
A: I don't have a ton of insight into that because I personally wasn't necessarily pursuing that directly. I, for one, am totally happy with Ashley Madison and Avid Life Media being a privately held company.
FULL ARTICLE @ BENZINGA
Dating Sites Have Made It Easier For People To Click With One Another
ECONOMIST – Dec 29 – The new year can be an unhappy time but it is a golden opportunity for dating sites, as singles are hoping to find romance—ideally before February 14th. “The period between New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day is our busiest six weeks of the year,” explains Sam Yagan, from OkCupid. Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formerly associated with them. ComScore says Match.com and Zoosk saw 4.6M and 4.8M unique visitors respectively in November 2010. Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners, an American VC firm that has backed Zoosk and BharatMatrimony, estimates that the industry’s revenues now amount to $3 billion-4 billion a year. The online-dating world has also spawned thousands of niche ones. Then there is the fuss over sites such as Illicit Encounters and Ashley Madison, which match people seeking partners for extramarital affairs. But to blame the service for infidelity is to confuse cause and effect. FULL ARTICLE @ ECONOMIST
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Ashley Madison Reveals Human Nature
FOX NEWS – Nov 1 – Researchers scanned ads from 200 men and 200 women chosen at random from Ashley Madison, a discreet dating service. The researchers investigated what the cheaters said they wanted in an adulterous relationship: "anything goes," "short term," "undecided," "long term," "cyber affair/erotic chat," or "whatever excites me." The men ~42 years old, advertised "anything goes" more than twice as often as women, while the women ~39, sought long-term relationships about two-thirds more than men. Women who were in relationships used significantly more adjectives describing the physical attributes they sought in partners and significantly fewer ones describing their material qualities than single women did. FULL ARTICLE @ FOX NEWS
Ashley Madison Targets Adulterers In Europe
CANOE.CA MONEY – Oct 18 - Controversial infidelity website AshleyMadison is launching across Europe this month. CEO Noel Biderman said the European response has been “mind-blowing” with 600K clicks on the German site and 100K members already signed up to the U.K. service. After Germany, Ashley Madison will land in Austria and Switzerland before hitting France, Spain, South America and Asia next year.
The full article was originally published at Canoe.ca Money, but is no longer available.
AshleyMadison Launches In UK
TNT MAGAZINE – Sep 30 – AshleyMadison is launching in the UK and its CEO is hoping to have 200,000 Londoners cheating on their partners by Christmas. Ashley Madison founder, Noel Biderman, claims that the affairs site is just being honest about something that is an unavoidable part of married life. “If 30 per cent of people who use mainstream dating sites are already in relationships, if they're having affairs at work which jeopardise their jobs or lead to unfair promotions, if they're visiting escorts and breaking the law, aren't we be better off cannibalising those destructive behaviours?”, said Biderman.
The full article was originally published at TNT Magazine, but is no longer available.
Noel Biderman Wants You To Cheat
YOUR TANGO – Sep 22 – Noel Biderman, the mastermind behind cheating website AshleyMadison, defends his dating site.
Q: How do you feel about promoting infidelity?
A: We should stop being so judgmental about it.
A monogamous marriage has a 50/50 chance of making it, you may realize
that cheating happens in order to preserve marriage.
Q: Doesn't Ashley Madison encourage infidelity by making it seem normal?
A: I don't think people are so pliable that seeing a 30-second
advertisement for Ashley Madison will make people want to go have an
affair.
Q: What made you start a dating site for cheaters?
A:
It wasn't about cheating, honestly. It was primarily business research.
Online dating was growing, and I read that 30% of its users were in
relationships.
Q: What's the breakdown between men and women?
A: 70% men, 30% women.
Q: When is your busiest registration day?
A:
Monday morning between 7 and 9 am, and the day after Valentine's Day or
New Year's—any big day full of expectation when you're let down.
Q: How did you come up with the name Ashley Madison?
A: Ashley
and Madison were the two top baby girl names at the time, so it didn't
sound tawdry. Women wouldn't sign up for something tawdry-sounding like
The Affairs Club.
Q: How much does it cost?
A: It's free to join, and we do a pay
as you play kind of a thing. You can buy 100 credits for $49. It's 5
credits to message someone, a chat is paid like a cab with a meter
running.
FULL ARTICLE @ YOUR TANGO
Marketing Affairs: How To Advertise Paramours
MARKETPLACE – Aug 19 - Noel Biderman is the president a company called Avid Life Media, which runs a bunch of niche dating sites. There's CougarLife.com for older women and younger men, HotorNot.com and AshleyMadison, a dating site for married people for which Noel has gotten a lot of attention. Noel buys traditional ads where he can. But of course, a lot of big media companies won't take ads from Ashley Madison. His response? Fine. He goes to plan B — decrying them in the press for being unreasonable. Avid Life pulled down $30M in revenue last year. Introducing cheaters to each other online has afforded Noel a pretty comfortable life. Noel does tend to defend his business with various theories and arguments about the future of matrimony and where we're headed as a society. But in the end, he says it really is all about the money. There's no way he'd be doing this otherwise.
The full article was originally published at Marketplace, but is no longer available.
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Vancouverites Cheat Less: Infidelity Site
METRO NEWS – Aug 3 - Noel Biderman, co-founder of Ashleymadison.com, a dating site for married people looking to have an affair, said business is booming everywhere except Vancouver. “It’s either something in the culture or the active nature of the citizens,” he said. He said he saw the opportunity for an infidelity dating site when he learned that 35% of people on singles’ dating sites were married. Infidelity need not be vilified, he said, adding that in some cases, it can actually save a marriage.
The full article was originally published at Metro News, but is no longer available.