In 2001 - when Noel Biderman founed his wildly successful website
Ashley Madison - there was no Facebook yet, and Google was still competing Yahoo. Ten years later Facebook is the world's No. 2 and Google is the no. 1 website on this planet. Both decided not to promote
Ashley Madison. Crying censorship, Biderman is fighting back: "The Facebooks of this world feel the need to be these bastions of morality. I just find it hard to believe we want them making decisions for us." No chance. The owners of adult businesses may run up and down the walls of their seaside mansions in Southern California, it won't help them if a guy like Steve Jobs decides not to promote erotic movies via iTunes and if Microsoft wants no part of it. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft are not playing Big Brother but showing moral defense.
But who the heck is Noel Biderman anyway? He is infamous for owning the site that helps married people have affairs,
Ashley Madison. But he doesn't publicize the fact that he also owns other niche dating sites like
CougarLife,
ManCrunch and
Swappernet.
In 2007, Microsoft (msn.com/bing.com) stopped letting
Ashley Madison advertise and buy keywords.Both search engines won't even let Biderman buy the words "Ashley Madison," which got trademarked by Biderman. He complained to Microsoft, but the company continued selling ads and keywords to competitors. And there was nothing Biderman could do. Other media giants followed. In 2009, ESPN stopped running
Ashley Madison ads. When ABC premiered the show Cougar Town, Biderman pushed to advertise
CougarLife but ABC refused. But no company has put up more roadblocks to Biderman's strategy than Google. When Biderman tried to buy
Ashley Madison ads on YouTube in 2009, Google not only denied his company but also banned it from advertising on the hundreds of thousands of sites in Google's content network. In May of 2010, Google announced it would no longer allow ads from sites containing the word "cougar," including Biderman's site,
CougarLife.