Earlier today it was revealed that AshleyMadison.com, the worlds leading hook-up site for married folks and cheaters of all kinds has been hacked. The recent hack potentially effects Ashley Madison’s full user database of 37 million current and past members world-wide. Avid Life Media, owners of the infamous cheaters dating site said that they have employed the help of “…one of the world’s top IT security teams…” to help work on the breach.
Operators of AshleyMadison.com have not openly commented on the extent of their security breach but they did release a public statement on the event, “We apologize for this unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our customers’ information…We have been able to secure our sites, and close the unauthorized access points…Any and all parties responsible for this act of cyber-terrorism will be held responsible.”
The hackers, calling themselves the “Impact Team” are threatening to release the data to public websites and forums. They claim that they are able to obtain specific sexual fantasies, usernames, real names, addresses and credit card transactions for the entire Ashley Madison user database. This also includes information for deleted accounts. This last point exposes Ashley Madison’s “full delete” option and problems with user privacy. Despite the fact that Ashley Madison charges users a premium fee ($19 US) to permanently removed their account and information, this breach shows the data still exists.
Once a company that boasted about it’s online security prowess and privacy for it’s members, the owners of Ashley Madison now find themselves doing some major damage control. No matter the outcome now, it is obvious that consumer confidence has been shaken. This loss in confidence has had some unforeseen results for online video sites and related brands.
Since early this morning, Porn.com has detected a surge in a variety of porn searches and an increased in traffic from select niches. From our perspective, this shows many who would commonly visit Ashley Madison are returning to a few more reliable mainstays in the adult world; namely XXX Video sites.
Let’s look at a quick break-down:
The following are preliminary results as we get them since this morning’s announcement of the Ashley Madison data breach. We look at notable and sudden increases for specific search terms and categories and compare that to average (AVG) data we’d expect in the same time frame.
Category Searches – Largest Gains (Overall, all demographics)
Teen/Coed – up 6.6% from AVG
MILF – up 12.4% from AVG
Cougar – up 5.8% from AVG
Amateur – up 9.7% from AVG
While we continue to detect an increase a notable increase in MILF and Cougar related searches, the increase in viewing Amateur content also indicates a good portion of guys out there are looking for a new outlet. The categories listed above are typically consistent with the content Ashley Madison users enjoy. At porn.com, we like to take a closer look at things so we looked for similar increases within our 35+ age demographic. The results were even more dramatic.
Category Searches – Largest Gains (35+ age demographic)
Teen/Coed – up 11.3% from AVG
MILF – up 14.5% from AVG
Cougar – up 7.9% from AVG
Amateur – up 12.4% from AVG
Within males that are of married age, we see an even more pronounced change. Consumer trust certainly is an important thing! We do expect these numbers to even out as more data is collected in the coming hours and days.
We actually observed a similar pattern in March of this year when a very similar breach occurred at Adult FriendFinder. We’ll be watching for more developments from this Ashley Madison story but for the meantime, we suggest watching some good ‘ol porn to deal with those adulterous urges.
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