Revelations that extra marital dating site Ashley Madison had been hacked, with personal details of 30 million of its members and their activities being published on-line, has massively increased interest in the site rather than harmed it.
Analytics website App Annie reports the adultery website’s official app has experienced an upwards boost in Apple’s App store sales this week, even after member’s personal data began appearing on the Dark Web when a hacker group, known as the Impact Team, released the personal information. Leaked details included GPS location information of home addresses, emails and credit card numbers.
The group announced in July it had hacked into the website and that it would begin leaking information unless Ashley Madison’s Toronto, Canada based parent company, Avid Life Media Inc. shut down the site.
In British Apple Store app sales charts, the Ashley Madison app soared 483 places from 1,198th to 715th. The store contains 1.6 million apps.
In the Social Networking section of the store, it jumped to 51st position, its highest placing ever.
Traffic to the Ashley Madison website has also risen – up 22 percent since the incident occurred.
Relationship and social media experts say the exact reasoning for the boost in not clear but it could be suspicious partners wanting to see what the app is all about, while some others may have heard about the Ashley Madison service for the first time because of this week’s media reports.
The relationship experts said one thing that is obvious is that the fear of ending up on an online “cheaters” database was not necessarily a deterrent for would be adulterers or double timers.
One thing’s for sure though – the age old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” still appears to hold.
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