Ashley Madison is back with updated news. However, Ashley Madison isn’t addressing the infamous list of names , emails, and credit card data that is still being published online and being removed continually. No, this time, Ashley Madison has returned to update the public about misconceptions in the number of women who were reportedly using the Ashley Madison platform overall.
In a new statement from Avid Life Media, the company corrects reports that say Ashley Madison only had a limited amount of women using their site.
“Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated. The company continues its day-to-day operations even as it deals with the theft of its private data by criminal hackers. Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing. This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform – including 87,596 women.”
Apparently, the Ashley Madison website owners are referring to reports like the one from CBS News , which cited analysis of leaked Ashley Madison data that said many of the female accounts were fake and few in number in comparison to the millions of real male accounts on Ashley Madison.
“Some journalists have turned the focus of the criminal act against Ashley Madison inside out, attacking us instead of the hackers. Last week, a reporter who claimed to analyze the stolen data made incorrect assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data. This reporter concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on those assumptions. That conclusion was wrong.”
In actuality, Ashley Madison had a lot more female active members, claims Avid Life Media.
“Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform. Furthermore, in the first half of this year the ratio of male members who paid to communicate with women on our service versus the number of female members who actively used their account (female members are not required to pay to communicate with men on Ashley Madison) was 1.2 to 1. These numbers are the main reason that Ashley Madison is the number one service for people seeking discrete relationships.”
While Avid Life is fighting for Ashley Madison’s life, what the company fails to address is the fact that many more women were likely on Ashley Madison last week because of spying. Those wives and girlfriends likely found their significant other’s email address on one of the many Ashley Madison lists and signed up in order to send messages to see who would bite.
Another reason Ashley Madison could’ve been a lot more popular last week was because of journalists and curious others signing up on Ashley Madison in order to try and scout for people to interview. The fact that Ashley Madison wasn’t as secure as they claimed should make folks look at this new statement with a leery eye.
A third and most likely reason there was a flurry of activity on Ashley Madison last week was due to women who’ve chatted with men on AshleyMadison.com asking each other if their data had been exposed.
“We have customers in nearly every zip code in the United States, as well as users in more than 50 countries around the world. The Ashley Madison app is the 14th highest grossing app in the USA social networking category in the Apple App Store. Approximately 70 percent of our revenue on any given day is from members making repeat purchases. We think that shows happy customers on a consistent basis.”
Indeed, there were only three zip codes in the whole of the U.S. that didn’t appear on the leaked Ashley Madison lists, so the company appears to have that part of their statement correct. However, for the company to say they have “happy” Ashley Madison customers in the wake of a hack that has seen some users reportedly killing themselves seems to take the new Ashley Madison statement a bit too far.
“Ashley Madison is the number one service for real people seeking discreet encounters. We invite everyone to visit our website or our app and make up their own mind.”
[Image via Ashley Madison]