Quick Summary:
Hookup potential: 4/5 Features: 3/5 Design: 5/5 Content: 4/5
- Straight-up dating agency for people looking for affairs and casual relationships
- Direct and to the point. You get a slew of profiles when you search according to proximity, and none of them seem fake.
- Simple, functional design. Just what you need and nothing else.
The Full Story:
This is a nice, easy website for people looking to hook up locally, particularly if it’s for an extra-marital tryst. Ashley Madison’s concept is “a dating agency online”. After logging in, the main options presented are to: open your mail, update your profile, or search for profiles. There are no bothersome ads, no link to this and that. There isn’t even any of the harping cams and videos upsell advertising that many adult dating websites have.
What you see is what you get. Take the search for example. You can do a simple or advanced search. With advanced search, you can filter for fields. You can remove the “attached” people from your results page, if you are only looking for singles, or you can search for them exclusively, if you’re after the thrill of a fling.
Your search results in a list of profiles. You will see the basics elements of the profiles there, such as picture, location, age, what they’re looking for, and their current relationship status. For each result, you’ll see if the person’s online or not. You have an option to immediately chat with those online, if the person isn’t online you can message her or send her an online gift using credit points, which you purchase—a slightly different model than the subscription one used by most site. (A good model, we think—you only pay for what you use.) Profiles also have a private “showcase” link; you will only see the photos in here if you have permission from the showcase owner.
And that’s it. That’s basically the website.
Ashley Madison boasts a higher success rate in terms of hookups and affairs instigated than most other sites; the lack of community chat, webcams, and porn may be the main reasons why. Contact here is one-on-one, focused, personal, and direct. People here know what they want and are determined to get it.
For example, when you send a gift, there’s a standard flirty note there, and a field where you can add your own message. You are discouraged from sending random gifts to random people, because every gift you send costs you credits. When you “wink” at someone, you need to let them know what your wink means. There’s practically no way to avoid getting straight to the point. When you find someone and contact them you’re almost forced to let them know right away what you’re after. To me, that’s how an adult dating site should work. No games.
As for the design, the website is easy to navigate. Your standard links are those to your email, the profile search, and the links to update your profile or account. There’s no confusion as to where you’d need to go.
When you need to contact someone on your search results, you just go into their profiles, and chat, message, or give a gift. These are the only interaction allowed within this dating service, and it’s enough.
Like the site itself, the design is functional, straightforward, and clean – the only thing that bugged me visually was the “100% Affair Guaranteed” banner.
This banner promotes a paid service of the site (it’s an upsell). For almost $300, Ashley Madison Agency guarantees that you’ll hook up with someone when you use their website – so long as you undertake to chat with someone, message someone, and give gifts to someone a certain number of times per month for three months. Failure to do so voids the guarantee. You don’t get anything extra with this – it’s just a guarantee. Unless you’re a real troglodyte I’m pretty sure you’d be able to achieve the same result without the guarantee.
The thing is the banner is shoved in your face every time you load a page. Literally, they show the banner every time they get a chance. And it’s not like you can just click on the banner to close it, or choose to hide it. It stays there until you move to another page. It starts to feel irritating and intrusive.
I guess nothing’s perfect. Overall however, the Ashley Madison Agency seems on to a winner, though, and represents real innovation in the space. You might not be able to do better for your buck.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
sound cool
i will have to check it out
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I like the site’s simple design. Nice and functional.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Very subjective review. I actually find the site great in terms of usability.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I like the wink part. Makes flirting easier for me.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Checking the site. I agree with the admin’s post. Very subjective post. Keep it up!
July 8th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Site presents innovation and I’ll be glad to sign up one of these days.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Ashley Madison is a glorified chat room at best and probably run and operated by chatters. Women looking for men are swamped with e-mails almost immediately. If your a good chatter you can rise above the ranks and chat with a lonely women posting 10 year old pictures of herself when she was 30 lbs thinner. Some genus ex chatter came up with the idea of how to get chatters to pay for chatting, the men get to bid for the attention of women and the women get to be pedistlised and dotted upon by groveling males and both parties get to pay for it…..pure genus
August 4th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I signed up for Ashley Madison (AM) a couple of months ago so I think I can provide some insight from a man’s perspective.
Signing up and browsing is free but contacting anyone costs credits. The nice part about this is you control how long your money lasts rather than haveing a running clock like on most sites. When I joined you got 100 credits for $50 and you use 5 credits for initiating contact with someone. Subsequent contacts of the same type are free. There is the ability to send collect messages but I have disallowed them in my preferences, since they cost 5 credits to accept and another 5 to reply.
You can send “winks” to any member for free. Winks are short pre-written messages. an example is “Please check out my profile to see if you might be interested in connecting with me. If you are interested, “wink” me back and I will initiate contact!” For men, sending winks is a bit like fishing. You cast and cast and then every so often you get a nibble. This is because the women get flooded with winks and messages and simply don’t have the time to look into each one. I my case, I have sent dozens and dozens of winks and have gotten a few dozen responses. Of those, perhaps half have resulted in further interest such as exchanging photos and 9 or 10 progressed to chat. From there I had the offer to meet with 6 of them but only met 2 in person, mainly because one of the two is perfect for me and we’ve started a relationship.
A couple of things you should know:
Chat is a rip-off on AM. They charge something like 30 credits for 30 minutes. With free services such as yahoo and gmail there is no reason to pay for this. Spend the 5 credits for the initial contact and then take it off AM
Blank profiles limit interest, as do those where you simply check the boxes, so it’s best to write up a few paragraphs that might attract some attention.
Be patient when contacting the women. The better ones get swamped with hundreds of messages a day, so it might take a week or two to hear back from them.
In the end, I spent $50 and found a perfect match for me. It might not happen like that for everyone but it can happen.
August 4th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Thanks Anonymous, I really appreciate your comments. $50 for a perfect match sounds like a good deal, and your experience sounds a lot more positive than many I’ve heard about on other sites in the genre.
August 16th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Ashley Madison is pretty much a pipe dream for men who are hoping they can find an alternative to the obvious rules of nature.
you will realize this truth quickly.
Most of the women’s ads on AM are false profiles wich serve as bait for the man who wants to believe there are millions of married women dying to have sex with him.
False ads account for about 95+% of the ads.
Of the remaining less than 5% that are not false ads, about half are from professional escorts.
The remaining legitimate ads are from real wives who are fat, old, unsightly. no wonder they need to pay a website to find someone who would want to touch them.
the simple fact of life is that an attractive woman that you would want to do, doesn’t need help finding a man to fuck them. an attractive woman is offered free sex everyday of her life.
the point is the website works hard to get your money. all those fake ads are constantly hitting you up for chat, try to get you engage in email exchange, and send collect emails all of which will run through your credits pretty quickly as you are charged for contact, not by the month.
a pretty good scam that preys on men’s fatal weakness.
LET THE BUYER BEWARE!! if you’re that horny, save your money and get a girl drunk! your chances of success are 50/50. even if you fail, at least you’ll get to hang out with a real girl and you’ll get a buzz.
August 19th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I agree with most of what you said, but I have yet to find any ad that was from a professional escort. Can you tell me a search or name of one, I would like to see what their MO is so I don’t get scammed. Acutally I think I am being scammed, I have sent some 200 winks looking for someone to actually talk to on the phone, not IM and have not received any replies. Something does seem fishy.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Yeah, I signed up but hesitated to buy credits. Glad I did not.
The very next morning I get an email from a gal with a hot profile,
but in order to open the mail I would have had to buy credits.
Now I ask you, why would a hot babe send me an email when all I had was a blank profile and no picture. It’s an obvious scam to have me buy credits.
So, am saving my money. Going to find a gal the old fashioned way,
either in a bar or the grocery store.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Ashley Madison is clearly a scam. Go to ashleymadisonsucks.com for reviews of actual users (aka suckers). Robots contact you when your credits are low, posing as cute woman (actually AM employees). Or you could give it a try. Your dime.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:55 am
im not at all pleased with Ashley Madison,i think that there are a few legit’s on there as i actually did talk to one lady i met,before she decided not to pursue it further,however i have been enticed by ‘fake chat invitations,in order to burn credits and the woman will like act that she is interested in you,only to find out that she is trying to sign you up on another website,and like many others,i have sent out ‘WINKS’ many ,many of them to both on/offline and not one ever even say’s ‘no thank you’ most of these sites have just way too many red flags!! for sure there is a lot of funny and suspicious activity.the more genuine and honest you are the more likely you are to ‘get screwed’ and i mean with the driver!
August 31st, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Interesting comments. The “getting scammed by AM employees to burn credits” seems a pretty common thread. I didn’t experience it myself, but enough of you have mentioned it here that, you know. No smoke without fire.
There have been some positive experiences shared as well, though, so I can’t say the site is a complete fraud. I guess the answer is just to be very wary of people approaching you on the site to chat. Perhaps especially people with nicks like “hornymilf4u”, or people with “glamor” photos that have clearly been professionally taken — i.e. pictures of models that AM have purchased the rights to.
Caveat Emptor?
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I’m a woman, aged 35, 125 lbs, and I’ve never lacked for male attention…and I signed up for AM. Why? Because, I like sex and while I get hit on all the time, I like the idea of finding someone on a site where we both know what we’re there for. Why play the game and do the dating dance with some guy I met in line at Starbucks when I “shop” for a compatible guy online?
The only problem with AM is that I get slammed with about 50 emails a day from guys and I don’t have time to read them all every day. And honestly, if I don’t answer yours, that doesn’t mean my profile is fake. It means that I’m not interested. Honestly, if you’re fat, or balding, or don’t take care of yourself, why you think that AM would give you a better shot than you’d have at a hot girl in real life?
January 11th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I am with Alyssa on this one I got the smallest package offered to check it out i figured what is $20. I found 2 fun females to play around with one of them is still a regular thing. You have to do something to stand out from the crowd. I understand that a good number of profiles are fakes but it should be fairly easy to decide which ones are which. If the age and H/W info doesn’t match pictures or if there is only one pic (you have a good chance at a fake profile). It is very possible to find playmate but you can’t look like a troll and have no game at all.
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 am
Joined this site and had three meet ups of which the last one I am having a full time affair with (the first two were just lunch meetings and never progressed beyond that – my decision both times). If you are somewhat attractive and keep yourself in good shape you will find someone especially if you are about having an exclusive one on one affair. Lots of men are looking for one night stands and sadly that is a turnoff to most women on here.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 am
The site requires credits to contact people. I paid $50 for 100 credits. Every time you send an email it costs you 5 credits. Of course, people can send you collect emails which cost you $5 credits and another 5 credits to reply to them. My experience with the site has been mixed-to-bad. It took them over 8 days to give me my credits after the money came out of my account. I think also that they may hire some people to send out emails collect so that when you respond, you use up your credits. I sent a couple of messages to some girls and, after seeing my picture, they sent me collect messages saying that they are interested. Then I respond with a very simple message to start conversation and they do not respond and their “chat mode” is disabled. I think it may be coincidence, but it sure works to the site’s advantage so that people spend lots of money. Just my opinion, but I think it may be overrated and, worse, on purpose.
October 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
This website is crap & totally overrated for various reasons. As constructively put forward by Chris (above me), you got to buy credits, most of the users are automated which is quite cheeky. However I managed to get one contact details from someone who was married, but I got bored with her.
Seriously dont bother with this site. As glamorous as it looks on the outside the admins really need to drop the price right down.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I’ve used the AM site for a while and can tell you the volume of real women is fairly high. I’ve been on dates with a couple of women and emailed with many more. All of them real, actual people. I have had three suspicious emails from much younger women (I’m 35) but I don’t ‘collect’ those messages so it’s not a problem.
The ‘collect’ messages are a rip off, because you have to pay 5 credits to get a personalized message plus another 5 credits if you want to reply. Much better to just initiate contact for 5 credits if you think it might be worthwhile.
The unfilled profiles, generally women just browsing, I assume, is irritating, but it doesn’t cost you anything to find that out. Decent search capabilities when compared to Pof or Fling which are really terrible.
All in all, I think it’s a pretty decent site as long as you don’t answer collect messages and don’t instigate chat.
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:11 am
I’ve met many Woman on Ashley Madison.
It costs money, but it’s Very Effective.
Chat is the only way to go. Don’t Message as it is a waste of money.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
I’ve been a member of AM.com a couple times and have had a few dates as a result, but will definitely agree with some of the above comments – many profiles are indeed fake. It’s a mixed bag. If you’re patient and have a good BS detector, you can probably do pretty well on this site.
Search functions are pretty primitive and could use a lot more filtering options.
February 17th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
From what I was reading on their site, only the initial message (not counting collect messages) is charged, and additional correspondence is not. Only chat seems to be a waste of credits.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:17 am
if i ever had a website datinhg website (telepoting at the moment) i would make everone ject them slfs with anesthetics, so you would have tribal dateing, and most off all, tribal sex. (please ihnore this reply.)