Ashley Madison Stats: 5236 Indians Spent Rs 2.4 Cr Between 2008 And 2015; Mumbai Emerges As The Biggest Spender

“Life Is Short. Have An Affair” – Tagline of AshleyMadison.com

The concept of AshleyMadison is something unique and sinful as it propagates extra marital affairs, both discreetly and openly. The website was launched in 2001, and as of now, it has around 37 million users.

All hell broke loose in July this year, when a group calling themselves ‘The Impact Team’, hacked the servers of AshleyMadison and last month they leaked more than 25 GB data pertaining to users’ accounts, their email addresses, payment methods and more.

Analyzing the data gave several interesting insights into the business of dating for married people, as bizarre realities came into the picture.

For instance, it was found that a ‘Family Values Activist’ in USA named Josh Duggar had a paid account in this website. Another fact: Out of 37 million users, only 5.5 million accounts belong to women, and almost none of them ever sent any message to any male prospect!

Tecnilogica, a Madrid based agency created an interesting map, which depicted the spread of AshleyMadison paid users across the globe.

And now, Hindustan Times has churned out some facts pertaining to Indian users of this website, which further makes the whole story pretty interesting.

Some facts:

• Between 2008 and 2015, 5,236 Indians spent a total of Rs 2.4 crore on this website to get premium access to features (It takes 5 credits to sent a message to a female, while for females, it is free)
• Although the first INR was spent in the year 2008, when 2 users spent Rs 198 on the site, real traction began in 2013 when 95 users spent Rs 8,297. Last year, 10,129 users spent Rs 1.5 crore on the website, and in 2015, Rs 72 lakh has already been spent.
• Mumbai is the top spender on the website and the most number of paid customers are from Mumbai itself. Total of 939 users from Mumbai have collectively spent Rs 45 lakh on the website since 2008.
• Bangalore with 813 paid customers comes at #2 position, and total of Rs 35 lakh have been spent by them till date.
• New Delhi with 711 users is at close #3, and total amount spent by Delhites amount to Rs 34 lakh.
• The top 8 Indian cities with most paid customers:
  • Mumbai (911)
  • Bangalore (813)
  • New Delhi (711)
  • Pune (361)
  • Chennai (343)
  • Gurgaon (268)
  • Hyderabad (241)
  • Kolkata (136)
• The top 10 cities based on spending are:
  • Mumbai: Rs 45 lakh
  • Bangalore: Rs 35 lakh
  • New Delhi: Rs 34 lakh
  • Pune: Rs 16 lakh
  • Chennai: Rs 13 lakh
  • Gurgaon: Rs 12 lakh
  • Hyderabad: Rs 10 lakh
  • Kolkata: Rs 6 lakh
  • Ahmedabad: Rs 5 lakh
  • Noida: Rs 4 lakh
    
• A person from Mumbai has spent Rs 1.4 lakh in the last 7 years; which amounts to Rs 20,000 per year for a dating website where maximum profiles of women are fake, and even genuine ones hardly message! HT team has sent an email to this person, but has received no reply as of now.
• From Rajkot, a person spent Rs 98,000 in the website, which makes him ranked #4 in the overall list of spenders.
• It is not just metro locations which have fans of Ashley Madison; even tier 2 cities are keen on the concept. For example, Malda, a small town in West Bengal has 128 users on the site (all males), whereas Barwani, another Tier 2 city in Madhya Pradesh has 750 members; Avinashi, another rural hinterland in Tamil Nadu has whooping 1798 users since 2008!
• If we talk about payment methods, then Visa is the most preferred method to make payments, as 10,859 users have used this mode. Master Card comes at #2 position with 5068 users and American Express is at #3, with 1024 users.

And, after all this ‘negative publicity’, popularity of Ashley Madison continues to soar. As per their recent press release, after the news of hacking broke out, 87,596 new accounts have been created by women on this website, and 2.8 million messages were exchanged on the platform in the last one week.

The ratio of male to female (paid users) is 1.2 : 1.

You can find the report from Hindustan Times here.

And more about the Ashley Madison data breach here.