Is Ashley Madison Really Still Adding 1 Million Users Per Month?

Ashley Madison has become synonymous with infidelity, especially since August when a massive hack disrupted the lives of millions who were signed up on the site.

But as business journalists dug a little deeper on the site’s financials, as well as the data dump itself, they found out that much of the site’s “success” was manufactured.

Those 37 million users that it had in August of 2015? The Next Web reports that “around 80 percent of new members’ purchases were with bots before the breach occurred,” citing an article from the Daily Mail.

Furthermore, only around 5 to 7 percent of the site’s users were actually female, meaning that Ashley Madison had created tons of fake accounts to keep their paying male users engaged.

One of those users was none other than disgraced Christian personality Josh Duggar himself, whose account was revealed on the heels of the revelation that he had sexually molested some of his sisters as a teenage boy.

While the Duggar family struggled to do damage control, the Ashley Madison hack occurred, pushing his skeleton further into the activist family’s closet.

The Duggars were not the only “victims” of the Ashley Madison hack, however. There were others, such as Pastor and Seminary Professor John Gibson of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, who took his own life when the news became public to his wife and two children.

Those details, among others, are significant, because Ashley Madison recently announced that its subscriber base had been growing by 1 million users per month following the cyberattack. That seemed improbable to TNW, which pointed out a part of the website’s user agreement as reason for doubt.

With that fine print, as well as the massive black eye that the website took on the data dump, it is highly unlikely that Ashley Madison is benefitting from the “any press is good press” school of marketing.

The more likely scenario comes from company founder Noel Biderman in an email from the data dump itself, and it’s something TNW points out in this excerpt.

“We know this because when the data dump occurred in August last year, there were a whole bunch of emails between then CEO Noel Biderman’s and his fellow executives. … In those exchanges were details of how women account for only around five to seven percent of all accounts on the site and that Biderman was pushing his managers to work harder to make a system that can churn out fake women’s accounts for the bots to use.”

Aside from that reality, there is also the fact that Ashley Madison financials were in a quandary from 2010 to 2013. Then, they mysteriously jumped by double from $76 million to $115 million in 2014.

While it is certainly true that bad press can give one a boost in sales, the scenario is widely considered unlikely here because the whole point of an Ashley Madison account is to discretely arrange extramarital affairs.

Privacy is the cornerstone of the business model, and without that, there is little reason for someone to sign up. In fact, doing so at this juncture could be considered a cry for help, a desire to get caught as the company has proven to be weak at keeping data a secret.

But what do you think, readers?

Is Ashley Madison going so far as to make up new users in the wake of the cyberattack? Do you believe that they are really adding 1 million people per month? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Image via Ashley Madison website, linked above]