Nothing stings like rejection. Just ask Noel Biderman, president and chief operating officer of Toronto-based Ashley Madison, a controversial dating website that provides a way for its 1.5 million members to meet and pursue extramarital affairs.

Biderman has been upset ever since Microsoft’s search engine, MSN.com, turned down his agency’s attempts to buy advertising space.

Ashley Madison tried to buy keywords such as “married local women,” “have an affair,” “meet people discretely” and “swingers.” If MSN had agreed, any of the site’s five million monthly users who typed those words into the search engine would have seen Ashley Madison’s sponsored link alongside the regular search results.

Biderman learned of the ban in October, and he’s still livid about it. “This reeks of censorship,” he says. “We break no laws and there’s clearly a demand for our service. Search engines control the majority of eyeballs that flow through the Web, and they’re precluding companies from being a part of that for no good reason.” Other search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask and Kanoodle, as well as TV networks, such as Omni, Fox and Global, currently run Ashley Madison’s ads.

According to MSN Canada, the policy behind the ban is simple. In addition to prohibiting the advertisement of sexually explicit content and the promotion of alcohol or firearms, the search engine has recently introduced guidelines that “disallow the monetization of advertising for certain services, such as those designed to facilitate deception, including extramarital affairs.”

Biderman says the ban isn’t fair because other dating websites are allowed to advertise - sites he claims also cater to married people interested in having affairs, but aren’t as honest about it. “In fact, we encourage honesty on our site,” Biderman argues. “Barring Ashley Madison is akin to barring the Four Seasons or Motel 6 because who knows if people checking in together are actually married.”

Ashley Madison isn’t the only morally questionable business to be spurned by MSN. The Alibi Network, for example, an American company that provides assistance to people looking for an excuse to skip a day of work or an alibi to cover up for a trip with a secret lover, was banned from advertising in November when the new editorial guidelines were introduced.

But is rejecting a company’s ad dollars really censorship? Avi Goldfarb, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, isn’t buying Biderman’s claim. Search engines are private operators, he says, free to draw whatever limits they’d like on their clientele. “If they don’t think a business is appropriate, they all reserve the right to say no,” says Goldfarb, “and they regularly refuse people.” So, barring a change in MSN’s policy, Web surfers keen on exposure to morally dubious advertising better stick with Yahoo or Google.

Source: Samantha Israel, Financial Post Business

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