Mba650: Ashley Madison Case

             Ashley Madison Case

Qing Yan

MBA650

Prof. Ying Sai

10/12/2015

Personal experience

People in the world sometimes feel lonely even when they get married, and for those who are satisfied with their marriage, they still want to find fun outside. In order to meet the “special needs”, website such as Ashley Madison arises. No doubt, Ashely Madison is the best with its peers.

In order to have deep investigations, I sign up in order to know how people in that web connect with each other. Since I hide my real identity, I should be very reverent and respectful and I didn’t reply any emails, because I really don’t want an affair, but I have to say, the user experience is so fabulous. There is no erotic content, and everybody seems so decent. First, I get started by telling them my relationship status, that is “Attached Female Seeking Males”, and also, I set up my own preference, for example, seeking for a male aged 42 years old, the limits, height, weight, body type, ethnicity, etc. You can upload your profile photo and also you can choose to receive access to a member’s private photos automatically send them yours. Aside from other website, Ashley Madison provides very detailed needs description for the users. The users can provide their favorite types in many details vis-à-vis. After filled up all my self-introduction, minutes later, someone come to me. The emails are very polite and Ashley Madison did not send me many junk mails. In brief, it is so unexpected that the website looks pretty normal, but actually, it challenged the ethic bottom-line, having an affair just can be unscrupulous like chat on Facebook.

Company Background

Ashley Madison is a Canada-based online dating service and social networking service marketed to people who are married or in a committed relationship. Its slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair”. The website was launched in 2001. The name of the site was created from two popular female names, “Ashley” and “Madison” (Daum, Meghan, 2001).

The founder and chief executive of the company, Noel Biderman, was a lawyer, who was often handling disputes for teams like NBA. After talking to the team members, Noel Biderman found the commercial potentials since 90% of the disputes accounted for affairs. He established the website in Canada in 2001, then expanded to other countries rapidly. Biderman and the other founder, Darren Morgenstern, took great efforts to understand the deep reasons for the “playboys” who need an affair, they hired a computer expert from Australia. Now it has hundreds of employees, and most programmer are hippies, but the board are quite conservative. Most users are male, the rate for male and female is 7:3. Although it is free to create an account and to browse other users’ information, if you want to chat or send emails, you will be charged for 79 dollars or even more, once you need advanced services.