So recently there was a documentary on Netflix that covered the rise of the site which basically billed itself as a dating site for people who wanted to engage in an extramarital affair. The main focus of documentary, however, is the infamous 2015 data breach, where hackers exposed the personal details of millions of users and the fallout from this data breach.

One of the most striking revelations from the breach though was the massive gender imbalance among users. The vast majority of Ashley Madison users were men, with a significant proportion of female profiles found to be fake or inactive:

In 2015, the Impact Team hacked Ashley Madison, revealing a disturbing male-female ratio on its website. The hackers said that about 90-95% of the accounts on Ashley Madison were male, and there were "thousands" of fake profiles claiming to be women. However, Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz said she learned that the website created many bot accounts. In an updated investigation, Gizmodo claimed that Ashley Madison allegedly created over 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users, creating the illusion of a vast number of available women.

Now I don't want to have a discussion about whether or not men or women are cheat more, but more on why do think a site like Ashley Madison seem to attract way more men vs women? The userbase in this case wasn't just majority men but a vast majority. Other demographic details revealed a lot these guys were diverse in age, occupation and probably looks as well.

It should be noted in 2020, Ashley Madison which is now active again, and now claims most of their users are women, do you trust them on that claim?