Criticism
Trish McDermott, a consultant who helped found Match.com, accused Ashley Madison of being a "business built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages, and damaged families". Biderman responded by stating that the site is "just a platform" and a website or a commercial will not convince anyone to commit adultery. According to Biderman, affairs help preserve many marriages.
Guarantee
Ashley Madison offered a guarantee that users will "find someone": "we GUARANTEE that you will successfully find what you're looking for or we'll give you your money back." To qualify, users had to purchase the most expensive package, send more expensive "priority" messages to 18 unique members each month for three months, send five Ashley Madison gifts per month, and engage in 60 minutes of paid chat per month. Compounding the problem is that "more men than women use the service, with the disparity increasing as they advance in age", and "Men seek sex, while women seek passion." A page on Ashley Madison, entitled "Is Ashley Madison a scam? Is Ashley Madison a fraud?" addressed some of these issues in an attempt to win over prospective customers and teach them best practices for using the site.
Segal and Millership phased out the guarantee feature on July 5, 2016. It no longer appears on the company website, advertising, or promotion.
Fake female bot accounts
According to Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, who has analyzed the 2015 leaked data, Ashley Madison had over 70,000 bots sending fake female messages to male users. They had previously released an analysis purporting to show that only a minuscule proportion (12,000 out of 5.5 million) of registered female accounts were used on a regular basis, but they have subsequently disavowed this analysis, saying that from the data released there is no way of determining how many women actually used the service. Newitz noted a clause in terms of service which states that "many profiles are for 'amusement only'".
In 2012, the company was sued by former employee Doriana Silva, who stated that in preparation for the launch of the company's Portuguese-language website, she was assigned to create over a thousand bogus member profiles within three weeks to attract paying customers and that this caused her to develop repetitive strain injury. The lawsuit claimed that Silva "developed severe pain in her wrists and forearms", and had been unable to work since 2011. The company countersued, alleging fraud. The company claimed that Silva had been photographed jet-skiing, an unlikely activity for someone who had suffered severe injury to the hands and forearms. Ashley Madison later alleged further that Silva had kept confidential documents and sought to retrieve them. In 2015, the Ontario Superior Court dismissed the case without costs, a result with which Avi Weisman, vice-president and general counsel for Avid Life Media, said the company was "very pleased". The Independent reported that the lawsuit was settled out of court and the company denied that Silva had created any fake accounts.
In July 2016, CEO Rob Segal and newly appointed President James Millership told Reuters that the company had phased out bots by late 2015. Segal shared an independent report by EY (Ernst & Young), which verified the phase-out.
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Advertising
Ashley Madison employed guerrilla marketing techniques to advertise its site. One such technique has been the creation of fake criticism websites filled with ads for Ashley Madison and anonymous testimony that the site is legitimate. For example, the site "AshleyMadisonScams.com" was purchased by Ashley Madison's owner, Avid Life, after CEO Noel Biderman made a throffer to the original webmaster who had set up the site to carry negative reviews of Ashley Madison. Dennis Bradshaw, the owner of "AshleyMadisonScams.com", stated "My girlfriend and I began receiving defamatory, harassing, threatening, and extortionary emails through an anonymous emailing service threatening to defame us both, and insinuating violence and severe emotional distress if my website was not taken down and surrendered at once. In these 'anonymous' emails, information was contained which was only known to myself, my girlfriend, Avid Life Media's Noel Biderman and our attorneys."
Ashley Madison advertised with provocative ads on TV commercials, billboards, and radio. Former CEO Noel Biderman was a relentless self-promoter and appeared frequently on talk shows to defend the website and the morality of infidelity. Ashley Madison has designed their ads for shock value, including the (unauthorized) use of celebrities and politicians with alleged sex scandals, and the resultant media coverage generates considerable exposure to their website. TV ads have been pulled from the air in some countries after frequent complaints, which Ashley Madison's ad creators see as successful since it whips up controversy.
Ashley Madison has often been accused of deliberately courting controversy to generate free publicity for its website with its proposed sponsorship. Some proposals turned down by the companies approached include €1.5 million and $11 million jersey sponsorship deals with Italian basketball club Virtus Roma, and Australian National Rugby League team the Cronulla Sharks, respectively, a $10 million offer to rename Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport and an offer for the naming rights of New Meadowlands Stadium. A statement denouncing proposed ads was made in 2009 when Ashley Madison attempted to purchase CA$200,000 worth of advertising from the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) on the Toronto streetcar system. With five of six committee members voting against it, the commissioner stated "When it's a core fundamental value around cheating or lying, we're not going to let those kinds of ads go on." Also in 2009, NBC refused an ad submitted by Ashley Madison for the network's broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII.
