Market for adultery revisited

Cheating, Incorporated At Ashley Madison's website for "dating," the infidelity economy is alive, well, and profitable By Sheelah Kolhatkar

Lots of interesting bits, here are some...

"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."
...
"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"
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"Promoting adultery and creating a market for it has made Biderman rich. It has not made him popular."
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"...Ashley Madison is drowning in husbands, so many that they threaten to crush the few venturesome ladies who have boldly—and perhaps recklessly—put themselves out there. Each time you log on as a female, it's as if a new batch of peanut butter packets has been dropped over a refugee camp—everyone leaps at them at once, and you are overwhelmed with messages, "winks," and men attempting to interact. The pricing system is cleverly designed to charge the men at their most vulnerable moment: Each time one of those hungry males tries to grab at the peanut butter, he has to spend a few bucks. Creating a profile and browsing others are free, but if you'd like to initiate an e-mail or chat conversation with someone, you must purchase "credits"—200 of them cost $79.00, and they run like a meter (e-mails after the first one cost nothing; charges appear ambiguously on your credit card bill). "
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"Curiously, Australia, where Ashley Madison was launched in April 2010, has the highest proportion of women users, at almost 40 percent. Biderman spent a few weeks there and says he noticed that prostitution is legal and that Aussie women aren't happy about it. "I think women down there have a view of the world that men have all these playgrounds—brothels, strip clubs, massage parlors," he says, "and they have nothing." Biederman has spent so much time studying his users, he sounds like an amateur sociologist: "We know there's a lot of doctors on there with god complexes who clearly either deal with so much stress in their lives, or believe they're so important, that having an affair—they're entitled to it."
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"Biderman is quick to explain why his business isn't hurting anyone. "You eradicate Ashley Madison, you're not going to eradicate infidelity."
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"When I asked Biderman's wife, Amanda, what it's like being joined in holy matrimony with an anti-marriage entrepreneur, she let out a long sigh. "Really, the business itself doesn't match who he is as a person—it's not our lifestyle or value system or any of that," she said. "I mean, yeah, I'd love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it's a business, and that's how we look at it."

HT: Benjamin Kay



For a historical view, see Elizabeth Abott, MISTRESSES: A history of the other woman; reviewed here:Mistresses through the ages: Prostitute, concubine, mistress, wife: the boundaries are blurred in this study

Adults for adultery?

The Telegraph reports: British women drive demand for extramarital dating websites: More than a million British adults have subscribed to extramarital affair dating websites, with up to 400,000 unique users logging on each week.

"MaritalAffair.co.uk, one of the largest sites of its kind, has almost 600,000 members. Analysis shows most members are parents aged 35 to 54, university educated, and browse from their own homes. Women using the site on a weekly basis outnumber the site three to one.
"Ashley Madison, a US-based website specialising in “discreet affairs” said it received a new British member every 45 seconds. More than 150,000 Britons use the site each week."

Extra-marital sex in France: Gleeden (and the importance of hyphens)

The NY Times is shocked: Extramarital Dating Site Unsettles the Land of Discreet Affairs

"The ads for the dating website Gleeden, which bills itself as “the premier site for extramarital affairs designed by women,” were recently splashed on the backs of buses in several French cities. Seven cities decided to withdraw the ads, and opponents have mobilized against them on social media, providing the latest example of a prominent cultural divide in France about the lines between public morality, private sexual conduct and the country’s vaunted freedom of expression.
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"A campaign by Ashley Madison, another extramarital website, featured President François Hollande and his three predecessors with smudged lipstick on their faces. “What do they have in common?” the ad asked. “They should have thought of ashleymadison.com.”
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Gleeden, launched in 2009, has a million subscribers in France, and 2.4 million globally, who can anonymously trawl profiles for lovers.
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An aside: some years ago, there was a book called Eats, shoots and leaves, pointing out that punctuation is important: the presence or absence of a comma can change how you read that book title.  Similarly, hyphens are important, although the NY Times has made "extramarital" one word--there's a world of difference between extra marital sex and extra-marital sex...

The market for affairs

Here's the latest on the growing 'infidelity economy', facilitated by the website Ashley Madison, about which I've blogged before.

Adultery is good for your marriage – if you don’t get caught, says infidelity website boss As global membership to the world’s biggest infidelity site soars to over 24 million, its founder explains the international appeal of adultery

"Famed for its catchy motto – “Life is short. Have an affair” – the dating service is free for women but paying for men.
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"The website is currently in the throes of a rapid global expansion: since launching in Canada on Valentine’s Day in 2002, it has attracted more than 24 million members in 37 countries, with South Korea launched last week."

Market for matchmakers: sorting by price

Dating and matchmaking services vary widely on a number of dimensions, one of which is price. Below I'll talk about services whose prices vary from zero to an initial fee of $20,000. One question is how much if anything does that already tell you about who might use which services?

Penny-Pinchers Might Unite at Free Dating Site
"Match.com, which is owned by Internet company IAC/InterActiveCorp and also runs dating site Chemistry.com, was set to announce Thursday the launch of DownToEarth.com. ...DownToEarth.com joins other free dating sites like Plentyoffish.com and OkCupid.com, and expects to bring in revenue from ads. It is geared toward Web dating newcomers and lets users put up post-rendezvous ratings regarding the truthfulness of others' pictures and profiles."

Online Dating Putting You Off? Try a Matchmaker
"Matchmakers prescreen potential matches, focusing on long-term compatibility rather than “short-term chemistry,” Ms. Clampitt said.
While online sites allow unlimited fantasizing, matchmakers encourage clients to take their heads out of the clouds. “Sometimes we will get a guy who is a good-looking man, but no Brad Pitt, and he wants a thin model,” said Shoshanna Rikon, the owner of Shoshanna’s Matches, a Yenta-style matchmaking service in Manhattan that includes an in-person interview and a Web presence, and charges about $1,500 for eight dates. “We try to be more realistic with who we set him up with.""

The New Arranged Marriage
"Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking Incorporated's fees begin -- begin! -- at $20,000 for an initiation fee, plus $1,000 for a one-year membership that includes 12 dates. That also includes a background check and a home visit, during which Janis spends time with the client, to get a sense of him and verify that he is who he says he is (i.e., rich or very rich). Her image consultant also comes to inspect his wardrobe and, if necessary, make plans to revamp his look. Janis has many clients outside the New York area (in Tampa, Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, Las Vegas). An out-of-town client must fly Janis and an assistant first class and put them up in a hotel for the home visit. Additionally, a marriage bonus is expected -- sometimes it's a car or extravagant jewelry; other times it's cash. She has received gifts in the $75,000-to-$250,000 range. "

This latter service primarily charges fees to men, and actively recruits attractive women to match them to. This reminds me of a 1993 paper by Mark Bagnoli and Ted Bergstrom called "Courtship as a Waiting Game" which considers why husbands are often older than wives. In their model, people live for two periods. In period 1, men and women are each endowed with a "quality" between 0 and 1, and a woman's quality is common knowledge at period 1, but, although men know their own quality at period 1, it only becomes common knowledge at period 2. So, in their model, the highest quality men wait until period 2, and marry the highest quality women. I guess that, in this model, the $20,000 above would be a signal of male quality... :)

Of course, the value of a match could be a subject of dispute; e.g. here's an 1885 report from the NY Times about a matchmaker suing to receive his full fee after a marriage was arranged but called off. Needless to say, matrimony need not be the only object of matchmaking; Daniel Hamermesh has a Freakonomics post describing an internet site "Ashley Madison, which matches up married women and men who wish to have a quick fling. " (I couldn't figure out their fee structure from the easy to access parts of their web page, but they do offer a $249 refund under their "Affair Guarantee Program" if you fail to have one...)

Market for adultery, in a recession

In an earlier post, I mentioned a website that caters to married people seeking an affair. It turns out that the business is countercyclical:
Adultery business cashes in on world's recession worries
"At the Ashley Madison agency, which revels in the motto, "Life is short. Have an affair," the global economic downturn is proving a boon for business. "

"Membership has soared from one million to 3.6 million in just 12 months, and he expects another surge after the company launched a service allowing members to access the site from their mobile phones. The innovation is aimed at would-be cheaters who are nervous about leaving evidence of their infidelity on their computer at home or work.
Mr Biderman said that many couples who would otherwise have divorced were seeking affairs at the moment because of the cost of hiring lawyers and the difficulty of selling the marital home. "