Ashley Madison needs way more women

Infidelity may be big business, as the founder of cheating site Ashley Madison used to insist. But a glimpse at its customers’ activity shows that the business depends heavily on men with unrealistic expectations—bordering on fantasy—of what they’re likely to get for their money.

Since hackers posted records on roughly 36 million Ashley Madison customers, with more possibly to come, the world has been gorging on titillating insights into the habits of cheaters. The data, however, may highlight disappointment more than anything else. The real product Ashley Madison is selling may be the hope of sexual excitement, rather than excitement itself.

The records posted by the hackers indicate that men on the site outnumber women by about 6-to-1. Simple math suggests men are far less likely to score a match on the site than women, assuming that women and men pair up with a similar number of partners. You can pay up for an "affair guarantee," which starts at $289 for three months. But that doesn't actually guarantee you'll have a fling. What it does is give you the basis for demanding a refund if you strike out, provided you've met a list of requirements, such as fully filling out your profile and contacting at least 18 fellow members each month.

Ashley Madison’s male-to-female ratio is out of whack with other dating sites, which hew close to a 1-to-1 ratio. On a couple of sites, such as eHarmony and Chemistry, women even outnumber men, according to NextAdvisor. Women also cheat on their spouses in larger proportions than they show up on Ashley Madison. While there is an “infidelity gap” between men and women, it’s been narrowing. Around 21% of married men admit to having an extramarital affair , while about 15% of women do. That’s a ratio of 1.4-to-1: again, much closer to parity than Ashley Madison’s customer base.

Apparently this mismatch is well understood at the company. “We had WAY more men than women,” one woman claiming to have worked at Ashley Madison as a customer-service manager from 2008 to 2013 wrote recently on Reddit. “65 year old men would call and complain that none of the 19 year old models they wrote to replied. They just refuse to accept that the 19 year old model might not want them.” Imagine that.

Making the problem worse is a high proportion of women on the site who are “cam girls” hoping to find men willing to pay for them to strip or perform live before a webcam, according to the Reddit guest. Ashley Madison makes clear that it’s not a front for paid sex performers, and it purges such accounts when it identifies them. But the business model clearly draws young women hoping to earn money from men willing to cheat on their wives, which is a different type of cheating than Ashley Madison claims to offer and may skew the male-female numbers even more.

Before the hack, Ashley Madison co-founder Noel Biderman was fairly straightforward about the overabundance of men on the site. In 2013, for instance, he told Bloomberg that men outnumbered women 14-to-1 among users over 65, 4-to-1 for people in their 50s, and 3-to-1 for users in their 40s. Only among users in their 30s, he said, was there an equal mix of men and women. That no doubt reflects generational changes that have occurred as women have joined the workforce and become the financial equals—sometimes betters—of the men in the family. Still, if the company were to post a disclaimer on the site saying men faced poor odds of hooking up, it surely wouldn’t be good for business.

It’s hard to call Ashley Madison a scam, since plenty of businesses—diet purveyors, fashion houses, fitness centers, and so on—sell the opportunity to be satisfied rather than satisfaction itself. What you make of the opportunity is up to you. In fact, Ashley Madison might have been a terrific business before hackers pulled back the curtain, since even the hint of success for many customers was more fulfilling than what they were able to find elsewhere. The risks, however, were a lot greater than anybody knew.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.