Ashley Madison Netflix Series Breaks Open Most Infamous Internet Cheating Scandal Ever
If you have never been married, never had an affair, or don’t pay attention to the news, you may have no reason to be intrigued by the new Ashley Madison documentary coming to Netflix. However, if you were around in the early 2000s, you may remember the slogan and the scandal. Either way, Netflix is about to break this story wide open with Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal on its streaming service on May 15.
You see, what set Ashley Madison apart from its competitors, as Netflix will surely remind us, was that this site was explicitly designed for married people.
“Life is short. Have an affair.” The ads were everywhere. You would see them on billboards, hear them during Howard Stern’s intermissions, and see them pop up on the internet. The World Wide Web was relatively new to the general population, and dating sites were starting to take off. Ashley Madison swept in to join them, and Netflix is going to tell us who, what, when, where, and why.
You see, what set Ashley Madison apart from its competitors, as Netflix will surely remind us, was that this site was explicitly designed for married people. If you were bored, unfulfilled, or just curious, you could log on to the site and find another married person in the same position. You could begin messaging, sharing your personal information, and sharing all of your lurid thoughts and desires.
The company was insanely successful. At its height, Ashley Madison had 70 million users, and its peak revenue, before its inevitable fall, was $115 million in revenue in 2014.
The idea seemed to be that it was safer or more comfortable for married people to have affairs with other married people, Presumably, neither person wanted out of their marriage, they just wanted to have sex with other people. So, in a kind of mutual agreement, two people would meet on the site with the ultimate goal of meeting to have sex and then go their separate ways… or not. Ashley Madison was the original Netflix and chill.
The company was insanely successful. At its height, Ashley Madison had 70 million users, and its peak revenue, before its inevitable fall, was $115 million in revenue in 2014. The company was valued at $1 billion. If we leave morality entirely aside, and for this conversation, we must, this dating site dedicated to extramarital affairs and casual sex did precisely what it set out to do: meet the needs of the people and continued to grow for more than a decade.
The Ashley Madison documentary slated for Netflix release on May 15th will surely tell us more.
So why is there an Ashley Madison documentary on Netflix? Well, of course, if there’s private information to be hidden, there’s a hacker out there to reveal it. And that’s just what happened. In July 2015, hackers calling themselves “Impact Team” announced that they had broken into Ashley Madison’s site and were preparing to release the private data of the site’s users if the entire website was not deleted from the internet within 30 days.
Clearly, Impact Team never intended to withhold the dirty secrets from the public, and true to their word, the hackers revealed the private data of 32 million users. Celebrity names were revealed, headlines were made, and the CEO stepped down in disgrace. The Ashley Madison documentary slated for Netflix release on May 15th will surely tell us more.
