Cheating, Incorporated

Clipped from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_08/b4216060281516.htm

At Ashley Madison's website for "dating," the infidelity economy is alive, well, and profitable

CEO Noel Biderman says monogamy "is a failed experiment" Finn O'Hara

Do you want to have an affair?

After hearing an ad on Howard Stern's radio show or seeing a schlocky commercial on late-night TV, you might find yourself on AshleyMadison.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. If you're like me, you choose a handle based on the cupcake you most recently ate—"redvelvet2"—and then shave a few years and pounds off your numbers.

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.

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. The day before our meeting, Ashley Madison had blasted out a press release accusing Fox (NWS) of refusing to broadcast its Super Bowl commercial. When I arrived, 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, although it's worth noting that during the most-watched Super Bowl in history, the network broadcast an ad for GoDaddy.com, in which racecar driver Danica Patrick wears a skintight body suit, and an Adam Sandler movie trailer featuring a barely-dressed jiggling woman. 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." Read more at www.businessweek.com

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