Ashley Madison

AshleyMadison.com has now opened their affair website to married men and women in the United Kingdom. For those of you who haven't heard of this site before it is described as a traditional dating site but for people who are already married. For UK members it costs £49 for 100 credits. With these credits members can email someone for 5 credits, chat in real-time for another 30 credits and send a virtual gift from 20 to 50 credits.

Apparently there are plans to spend upwards of £10million in advertising if Ashley Madison can get their ads approved by the Advertising Standards Authority. With this type of marketing budget Ashley Madison expects to have 1 million UK members in 3 months.

For more on this story read TNT Magazine.

According to the Toronto Star, AshleyMadison.com has seen a huge influx of female newlyweds (women married 3 years or less). In March of 2009 there were 3,184 women in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that were actively using the service. In March of 2010 the number had increased 4 times to 12,442.

When the service was first launched back in 2001 everything from the name to the color scheme of the website was designed to attract women. CEO Noel Biderman knew men would join the site easily enough; it was the women he was worried about. It seems Mr. Biderman did not have much to be concerned about. A number of experts are saying that the female infidelity rate has increased by 50 percent in the last 10 years. This is due to that fact that women now have much more exposure to potential partners through work and the internet than a generation ago. While men are cheating more as well, research suggests that about twice as many men on average cheat than women.

According to the Star, here are the Ashley Madison membership numbers as of March 2010:

Location	Females	Males	Total	Total in 2009
Greater Toronto Area	48,409	111,202	159,611	82,959
All of Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia	1,511,879	3,898,468	5,410,347	2,802,664

It looks like the gay dating site ManCrunch.com took a page from AshleyMadison.com play book. Last year AshleyMadison.com created an ad for the Super Bowl which was rejected by the TV Networks (see Story). They received a lot of free press because of it. This year it must be ManCrunch.com's turn. Here is the TV commercial in question:

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

While I was in no way offended by the commercial and I did find it comical, the problem is the production values are just not up to the standards for a show like the Super Bowl.

ManCrunch.com spokesman Dominic Friesen told the New York Post that CBS had said all the commercial spots for the Super Bowl were sold. Dominic Friesen felt this was not true and that there were being discriminated against.

Avid Life Media Inc. is the parent company of several online dating sites. This includes the popular affairs site AsheleyMadison.com, as well as EstablishedMen.com and CougarLife.com. Avid Life Media is looking to raise $60 million with its possible debut on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) in the coming months. In 2009 Avid Life Media earned $30 million in revenue and $8 million in EBITDA. The dating site Ashley Madison, currently accounts for only 15 percent of the total revenue earned by Avid Life Media.

Avid Life Media plans to use some of the money raised to buy an online advertising sales company called Moxy Media.

Television and film actress Ashley Madison Myrick (no she is not a Porn Star, that was a mistake by Fox) most famous role was becoming James Woods' boyfriend for a while. Recently she has filed a lawsuit against online dating site Ashley Madison for the “humiliation’ she has endured over having the same name as the site which promotes having an affair. Apparently she wants the site to change its name and to take her picture off of a related site, AshleyMadisonbio.com.

According to a $1 million counter-suit filed by AshleyMadison.com against the actress, the website has had the name “Ashley Madison” trademarked since 2002. The actress Ashley Madison Myrick only started going by the name Ashley Madison 3 years later in 2005. AshleyMadison.com also claims that they do not own the website AshleyMadisonbio.com and have no control over it (whoever does own it, has taken it down anyways).

The infidelity dating site is suing Ashley Madison for using their trademark to “inappropriately garner goodwill” to support her acting career.

More on this story can be found at Fox News.

As part of a $250,000 advertising campaign, Ashley Madison wanted to wrap ads on 6 street cars in Toronto, Canada. The ads read "Life is Short, Have an Affair AshleyMadison.com". The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) rejected the ads last Friday, due to the ads violating TTC advertising standards.

The Ashley Madison CEO, Noel Biderman, disagrees with the TTC committee because the ads conform with Canadian laws. He further states that the TTC shouldn't be making morality judgments, they are in business to run transit lines. This also comes at a time when the TTC is in the red financially and, will be hiking user fees in the near future to hopefully cover losses.

I don't think the National Media has caught on to the real Ashley Madison's advertising campaign. Ashley Madison makes their ads just racy enough that they know most established media companies will reject them. They then let it be known that their ads were rejected, and the rest of the media reports on it. This is FREE advertising for them. I counted no less than 3 Toronto newspaper articles on the topic of the Ashley Madison TTC Ads being rejected, plus several mentions on TV during the news hour and discussions on talk radio.

This is a publicity stunt by Ashley Madison and it has become a pattern for them. We saw it earlier this year when a Canadian TV Network (CTV) rejected an Ashley Madison commercial that would have aired during the Super Bowl (see Story). Another example of this pattern is when they offered Tiger Woods $5 Million for an endorsement deal (see Story).