Affair website Ashley Madison wants you to know that it is doing just fine in the wake of the 30GB data dump that has embroiled low-grade reality celebrities in scandals and revealed the company is little more than millions of horny men and fembots.
It’s just fine. Really.
“Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing,” the company said in a blog post, “This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform – including 87,596 women.”
The comment is particularly directed at the analysis of user data by Gizmodo that showed the website had scant few active profiles that were identified as female.
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The analysis backs up anecdotal data provided by the hackers that targeted Ashley Madison (and its parent company, Avid Life Media), Impact Team, as well as a lawsuit that said Ashley Madison paid a yearly salary to a woman who made roughly 1,000 profiles on the site.
Ashley Madison threw some of its own statistics at that analysis:
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.
Of course, that data is recent and would not have been included in the hack by Impact Team. It’s also countercurrent to Gizmodo’s findings, which indicated more than 5 million of the site’s 5.5 million registered female users were inactive profiles after the first 24 hours of creation.
Ashley Madison continues to get back on its feet after the weeks-long data dump continues to do damage to its reputation for being discreet and secure. While it was the subject of IPO rumors as recently as April, a report from Reuters says that hacked emails from ousted CEO Noel Biderman and additional internal documents indicated the company was eagerly courting buyers as investors were determined to pull out.
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