Ashley Madison - AshleyMadison.com

Not just a hook-up site, but a hook-up site for people who are already hooked. Yep, Ashley Madison is a site for married folk to find other folk to folk with. Like 'em or hate 'em, they claim 37 million members worldwide, including – surprisingly – in many Asian and Muslim countries. Japan was their fastest growing market, with over a million sign-ups in their first eight months of operation, and Japan has half the divorce rate of the USA. However, Ashley Madison was denied access in Singapore because the Government there said it “disregarded family values and encouraged adultery." Imagine that! Some fun facts: Ashley Madison offers a "You will find someone or your money back" guarantee.

Not just a hook-up site, but a hook-up site for people who are already hooked. Yep, Ashley Madison is a site for married folk to find other folk to folk with. Like 'em or hate 'em, they claim 37 million members worldwide, including – surprisingly – in many Asian and Muslim countries. Japan was their fastest growing market, with over a million sign-ups in their first eight months of operation, and Japan has half the divorce rate of the USA. However, Ashley Madison was denied access in Singapore because the Government there said it “disregarded family values and encouraged adultery." Imagine that!

Some fun facts: Ashley Madison offers a "You will find someone or your money back" guarantee. They were banned from advertising from the Super Bowl by NBC. (Hmm, wonder how Go-Daddy got through?) In 2010 they offered to purchase naming rights to the Meadowlands Stadium, but that went to MetLife instead. Shame they couldn’t have worked out joint naming rights – the cross-marketing opportunities between Ashley and Met would have been enormous. Just think of the need for life insurance if your spouse stumbled upon your profile on the AM site ... of course, you’d have to ask what she was doing there in the first place. Double indemnity, anyone?

Ashley Madison was founded by Noel Biderman, a former lawyer. There is no person named Ashley Madison. Mr. Biderman reportedly combined two of the most popular female names for millennials, and voilà, the creation of a trustworthy persona that seems to appeal to both wayward wives and wayward husbands. While Ashley Madison has been criticized for promoting adultery and exploiting unhappy periods in "Norman" relationships, many argue the statistics. 130 million visits per month in more over 33 countries, plus well over $120 million in revenues, suggests that they are simply meeting an existing demand and people will be people – with or without an adultery site.

There are other hook-up sites but Ashley Madison is one of the few exclusively dedicated to the extramarital affair market. Common complaints about the dating site industry in general include bogus or shill profiles, stalkers, excessive fees, hard-to-cancel subscriptions (Ashley Madison uses a point system instead of a subscription model), unauthorized charges and failure to protect user privacy.