Even In The Tinder Era, Adultery Site Ashley Madison Keeps Making Money Hand Over Fist Noel Biderman will usually lie if a passenger on an airplane asks him what he does for a living. He’ll say he’s a lawyer, which is true. Biderman is also a successful entrepreneur who earns more than $5 million a year, but just uttering his firm’s name is enough to halt the niceties. Biderman is the cofounder and CEO of Ashley Madison, a website that facilitates extramarital romance and sex. “There are times that I have told people, and that’s the end of the conversation.” All the attention and money that dating apps like Tinder are attracting has drawn Biderman into opening up some more about the financials at Avid Life Media, the privately held Toronto holding company that owns Ashley Madison, CougarLife and a handful of other love-connection sites. Biderman is out to prove that he can still compete in an age of free hookup apps like Tinder and Ok Cupid. Tinder, which has logged 600% growth over the past 12 months as of November, has more than 30 million registered users who collectively check out 1.5 billion prospective partners daily–that’s 17,000 per second....
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Ashley Madison’s clients are older and more prosperous than Tinder’s and not exactly eager to broadcast their moves. “Forty- to 50-year-old married men are not going to log into an account on Facebook,” he says.
Biderman, a former sports lawyer, launched Ashley Madison with a business partner in 2002. They each put up $500,000. It took five years to attract the first million members, but growth took off after the 2008 recession’s job cuts created a lot more free time on many men’s calendars. Ashley Madison embraced the nightclub model early on, after noticing that men on the site initiate contact with women 99.6% of the time. Women pay nothing, but men are charged for each contact with a woman. Men typically spend $200 to $300 a year on the site. If you want to wipe your profile completely from the site, that’s an extra $19.
Even in an era of ubiquitous Web porn, a site promoting adultery (after murder in the Ten Commandments) still has the power to offend. Ashley Madison is banned from South Korea and Singapore, and the justice secretary in the Philippines said she would like to do the same....
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Poster Comment:
The "free market" has no morals.
