

Can Google and Facebook Push Adultery Sites Off the Internet? - gatsby
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/can-google-and-facebook-prevent-you-from-cheating-on-your-spouse/71634/

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paolomaffei
We thought, 'Let's just do one of these ads that we know will get rejected,'"
he says. They shot the whole commercial in 25 minutes. When CBS refused it,
Biderman's company posted it all over YouTube and the Web, tagging it as the
"banned Super Bowl commercial."

\--

Kudos to you, Mr Biderman

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notahacker
This article is bullshit. Top result for a search for Google is an Adword for
his site, followed by a natural search result for his site, followed
predictably by Wikipedia and some affiliate sites dedicated to promoting his
site.

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jarin
The AdWords result seems to be an affiliate link (note the redirects before
you hit the site). It's likely that Google just restricted his AdWords account
and not the "ashley madison" keywords themselves.

~~~
notahacker
This may be true, but I think it's a bit rich to accuse Google and Bing of
"censorship" when they undoubtedly send him huge volumes of traffic in natural
search results whilst (perhaps) opting not to take his money.

That's also assuming they're not taking his money based purely on his
website's reputation, which I find doubtful given his obvious flair for
generating [relatively] cheap PR by getting SuperBowl ads banned.

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contactdick
It's an interesting method he's developed to generate buzz for his company.
Piggy backing big media draw-cards such as Facebook, Superbowl and Google
claiming they are banning adds to try and prevent him operating generates a
lot more free media attention than the adds themselves would have. I had no
idea adultery sites even existed until now.

I'm not married but would have thought standard operating procedure would be
to go to a singles website and just not tick married?

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mikey_p
After reading the section on Facebook blocking him, I though "Well duh, he's a
direct competitor of Facebook!!"

In all seriousness I don't know how many affairs originate through each site,
but with Facebook's volume, even a low percentage could eclipse Ashley
Madison. To be honest, I can't imagine MySpace, or any other social network
being allowed to advertise on Facebook either.

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jamn
Another question is to what extent AshleyMadison needs to rely on traditional
advertisement versus, say, word of mouth.

I don't particularly remember ever seeing an ad for Facebook, Google until
recently, or OKCupid. Yet it seemed to matter little as those sites grew.

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jtbigwoo
The difference, of course, is that people these days are quick to say how much
they use Facebook or OKCupid, but very few people are willing to talk with
their friends about their extramarital affairs.

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praptak
Porn sites shouldn't have any qualms about advertising this guy.

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jarin
Speaking from experience, porn sites send the worst traffic imaginable (just a
bunch of horny guys who don't convert). Then again, every site on his network
seems to target a fetish of some kind.

I don't think we'll run into any problems advertising SetForMarriage.com
(since it serves basically the exact opposite market as Ashley Madison), but
it is a little concerning that Google/Bing/Facebook might start to crack down
on the dating industry as a whole.

Granted, a lot of sites deserve it due to their ultra-shady business tactics,
but we're trying to at least try to build a legit dating site that actually
cares about its customers. For example, we try to answer all support emails
within an hour, we try our best to block and delete fake profiles (most dating
sites don't), we let non-premium users reply to messages (we got inspired by
the deleted OK Cupid post about it), and users can cancel their own
subscriptions via a big red button.

~~~
jrockway
Interesting. How successful are you in blocking fake profiles? How do you even
measure success?

~~~
jarin
It's difficult to measure, but we kind of eyeball it by looking at the
decrease in fake profiles with each thing we add.

CloudFlare was hands down the most effective thing we've done so far (by
blocking users by country and/or by Project Honeypot info). It virtually
eliminated all of the automated bot accounts and most of the human spammers.

A couple of days ago I changed the signup process to use the Facebook
Registration tool (under the assumption that Facebook is way better at weeding
out fake profiles than we are), and that seems to be working pretty well so
far. It's too soon to tell how it will affect our signup rates, but we'd
rather err on the side of quality profiles.

I'm also looking at running profiles through Mollom and some image-checking
service I can't remember the name of if we still have fake profiles slipping
through the cracks after all that, but we'll continue to go through the
profiles every day and try to find the bad guys.

We also gave a nice lady a lifetime premium account for reporting a ton of
suspicious profiles when we were first starting out. :)

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underwater
The image checking service is probably <http://www.tineye.com/>

~~~
jarin
It's something like Oculus, or something like that. I've tried to use the
Tineye browser plugin to check profile images, but it doesn't even pick up
Raven Riley images (for some reason, like 5-10% of spam profiles have used
Raven Riley as their image).

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gChinkin
It is interesting to see that his wife is defending him... Is she being
supportive or is it just about the money?

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blues
Ha! Hell no! Never as long as I'm here!

