Tangled Web

As online dating has lost the stigma once attached to it and millions of people flood big sites such as Match.com looking for love, niche dating sites have begun to proliferate to help narrow the field.

There are services for all sorts of people looking for something specific: animal lovers, gays, vegetarians, blacks, Christians, black Christians. One of the best known is JDate, the Jewish dating site. Yet its 700,000 members are a mere third of the number attracted to another site that has been under the radar until recently.

AshleyMadison.com has 2.2 million members and just launched a million-dollar advertising campaign - but national networks think America isn’t quite ready for a dating site for the already attached.

AshleyMadison’s new 35-second television commercial features an insomniac man lying next to a slightly zaftig woman. He sneaks out of the room holding his clothes. “Most of us can recover from a one-night stand with the wrong woman,” a narrator intones. Cut to a photograph of the man and woman together - on their wedding day. “But not when it’s every night for the rest of our lives. Isn’t it time for AshleyMadison.com?”

The site specializes in connecting people who are already partnered but seeking no-strings-attached affairs.

The company bought ad time on channels including ESPN, CNN, Fox News Channel and Spike, but the networks seemed to have second thoughts. ESPN, for one, says it has instructed its affiliates to quit airing the ad.

The company’s site went live at the beginning of 2002, but the new ad campaign marks the first time it has sought a mainstream audience. It used to advertise during airings of “The Jerry Springer Show.”

It’s having trouble getting the new ads to stay in place. A billboard in New York’s Times Square showed a couple entering a hotel room and urged, “Life is short. Have an affair in New York City.” It was removed after just three days.

“They got a call from one of the hotel operators across the street,” reports Noel Biderman, president and chief executive of the Toronto-based Ashley Madison Agency. “They said they were going to burn it down if they don’t take it down.”

The CEO can’t see what all the fuss is about when those same networks air ads with tag lines such as “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

“I am not going to convince anyone to have an affair. I don’t have that power of persuasion,” he says. “What I can do is get someone who’s made that decision to try AshleyMadison.” It’s a lot safer than messing around in the workplace or getting a “lady of the night,” the happily married father of two says rather quaintly.

“It’s like dumping raw sewage into the culture,” complains Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, who says she has had her own ads turned down by networks. “We live in a Hollywood culture that celebrates infidelity.”

Mr. Biderman agrees on that last point: He seems to think Hollywood already has done the work of making cheating look good. He notes that some recent movies widely considered romantic - including “Titanic” and “The Bridges of Madison County” - focused on cheaters. Of course, literature has had more than its share of sympathetic adulterers - think Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” - for centuries. “It speaks to the human condition,” he says.

His site certainly has struck a chord. In just 6 1/2 years, with very little advertising, it has attracted those couple million members. On a recent afternoon in the District, just before most people are thinking about leaving work, AshleyMadison had close to 50,000 locals online.

“That’s really socially significant,” says University at Buffalo American studies professor Elayne Rapping, a media and gender expert who was shocked to hear how many people are looking for extramarital affairs online.

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