The Ashley Madison hack is big news for year 2015. Several families and marriages were broken as a result of the hack, which revealed the identities of millions of adulterers. However, it appears that the site only received even more subscribers following the controversy.
The hack controversy did not seem to stop people from signing up with the website, because according to the official Ashley Madison site, there are now over 43 million registered anonymous users.
Before the hack happened in August, the site is said to have only 39 million users. Given it had been only four months since the controversy broke out, the growth in the site's number of subscribers is pretty impressive.
Ashley Madison has yet to give an explanation for the increase, but there are also theories coming from people as to why the site is still popular among people who want to cheat on their partners.
According to E! Online, the increase may have been because of the publicity given to Ashley Madison. In this case, the saying "any publicity is good publicity" holds true for the company.
Not a lot of people knew that such dating site for cheaters existed, until it made the headlines.
Another speculation is that the rise in the number of registered users was contributed by Internet bots.
Also, Ars Technica's Annalee Newitz strongly believe that the company has made thousands of fake female profiles just to lure men to join the site for free, based on an investigation carried out.
Further, the report mentioned that the company made up these fake profiles and made it appear that women are sending men messages, which can only be read when men pay to sign up.
The company had already faced accusations of fabricating the numbers of subscribers to Ashley Madison, but Ars Technica reported that the company issued a statement late in August to address the claims.
The news outlet added that the company only said those accusations are "wrong," but further explanation was not provided.
