Why Ashley Madison still gets thousands of new users every year

Ashley Madison operates in 50 different
countries.
Getty
Images

• Ashley Madison operates in 50 different countries, in 17
  different languages.
• Ruben Buell, the company’s director and CTO, said cheating
  isn’t something that happens once in a blue moon.
• Even after the data breach in 2015, people keep coming back
  to the site.
• It’s a better way to have an affair, said Buell, because
  you’re guaranteed discretion.
• “It’s just human nature,” he said.

If you sign up to Ashley Madison, you don’t have to think about
what you’re doing as cheating, but “outsourcing your sex life.”

“In 2018 we expect our life partners are going to be everything
to us — they’ve got to be my best friend, they’ve got to be
sexually compatible, they have to be great at coparenting,” Ruben
Buell, Ashley Madison’s president and chief technology officer,
told Business Insider.

“We have to have the same vision of finances, we have to have the
same hobbies, the same interests… There’s so much pressure on
that one relationship, everything has to be right.

“And sometimes, the vast majority of it is right, but maybe
there’s something that’s not.”

This is one of the reasons Ashley Madison currently sees 20,000
new sign ups a year, and over 40,000 affairs happen on the site
every day.

Even after the data leak back in 2015, people came back to Ashley
Madison. Buell said the company had to focus on the security and
privacy in the whole company after what happened, and now it
realises how important it is to keep user information as secure
as possible.

“It’s the upmost importance to us, and I think the firm has done
a really great job and really brought itself back to life,” he
said. “And I think the users see that.”

Cheating isn’t something
that happens once in a blue moon.
Shutterstock/ wavebreakmedia

Why they keep coming back

People don’t generally cheat because they want to leave their
relationship, he claimed, but to outsource their sex life.

Research from sociologist Alicia Walker last year found that
women in particular “cheat to stay.”

“They very much presented this scenario that their marriages are
either completely sexless, or orgasmless — at least for the women
themselves,” she told Business Insider at the time. “They very
much convey that: if I don’t do something to address this, I’m
going to end up leaving. I’m going to end up breaking up my
family, breaking my children’s hearts, breaking my husband’s
heart, and I just don’t need that.”

A fling isn’t worth tearing a family apart, Buell said, so if
cheating is going to happen it may as well be in a way that
causes the least obvious harm.

He said Ashley Madison’s main competitor isn’t another website,
it’s the workplace. But instead of hooking up with a colleague,
or meeting someone in a bar, he said Ashley Madison offers
discretion.

It also means you’re going to meet someone on the same page as
you, and in a way, things are more honest from the get go.

“The community at Ashley Madison is a very open minded community,
it’s also one where you have less risk,” Buell said. “It’s
actually contrary to what you think, because a lot of
relationships at Ashley Madison start from a very honest place.
So you have two people who really aren’t trying to hide
anything.”

When dating traditionally, you can go out with someone four or
five times before you start to show them your true self. But on
Ashley Madison, Buell said, the flaws are all visible right off
the bat.

“If a person is going to have an affair you should probably have
a better type of affair,” he said. And plenty of people are
looking for something that Ashley Madison can offer, as “it’s
just human nature.”

“We don’t operate in 50 different countries and 17 different
languages because it’s a small thing that happens once in a blue
moon,” he said.

“I think at some point we learn that life isn’t exactly the fairy
tale we were told when we were little boys and girls. Life is
real. Our average users are in their 30s in their 40s, they’ve
lived life, and they’ve realised sometimes they’ve got to do
something for themselves.”