If you talk about the dating site for married couples to find and have extramarital affairs, you are guaranteed to get at least one horrified look. In fact, this writer did! But is Ashley Madison, the dating site where married couples can find someone new to have an affair with, a completely evil scandal or is it just good business?
Let’s look at some statistics first.
Ashley Madison currently enjoys a membership of over seven million. Seven. Million. On top of that, the site claims to get over seven hundred thousand unique visitors a month. That’s a lot of disgruntled married people! In the ten odd years since Ashley Madison kicked into the internet, it has therefore grown by about 700,000 new members a year. Yikes!
Extramarital affairs are a common theme in many relationships, causing problems in the marriage and sometimes leading to divorce. Other times though, the affair can bring a couple closer together-it may be that the affair was the kick the couple needed to realize they needed to pay more attention to each other or it could be that all one person needed to stay was some sex that he or she wasn’t getting at home.
Ashley Madison has had its share of controversies and fighting. In 2009, NBC banned an Ashley Madison commercial and wouldn’t allow it to play during the Super Bowl. Attempts on the part of the company to rename things like airports and stadiums (for a hefty pay off) were rejected. And of course every time there is a scandal of affair, the name will likely start drifting around, whether or not it was connected. But at its core, the big fight is the slogan: Life is short. Have an affair. A site like this is of course going to draw fire on the founder.
But is it just a pure scandal? It cannot be denied that with so many visitors and paying customers, Ashley Madison is doing very well for its founder. And even the founder himself pointed out, and rightly so, that his site alone is hardly going to make a faithful spouse suddenly decide to cheat. If you’re looking up stuff on Ashley Madison, chances are that you are looking for a discreet way to cheat! (unless of course you’re an affiliate or writing about it and even then…) So one can hardly pile on society’s woes to a single website that is doing little more than filling an existing need. It makes good business sense to set up a business that fulfills a need; that’s economics and business 101!
The bottom line is that no one is making you cheat, no one is making you visit Ashley Madison and no one is making you set up a profile there and use it. You’ll never even see the site except in occasional news articles unless you are specifically looking for it and for you to be looking for it, you must have a reason. Therefore, it’s not entirely fair to simply condemn this rather unique site as being the cause of affairs. While the role it fills may not be tasteful to many people, the need is clearly there, as indicated by the many users, visitors and the money rolling in for the owner. So it may not be moral or ethical, but a site that caters to married people sure has shown to make for good business!
Now whether that makes you sad, angry, rueful or curious, well, that’s up to you. But the site is there, affairs will exist long after it dies, and it is making good money and helping its customers. And that is just good business sense.
