An analysis of online dating
Online dating is gaining momentum and is an easy, socially acceptable way to find partners for dates or relationships. To a social scientist, the wealth of data stored on online dating services has enormous potential in the study of interpersonal relationships. Instead of having to take surveys and interview people, scientists can now discover findings by looking at the statistics of what actually happened. Actions speak louder than words. Never before has something so human and primitive been reducible to such quantitative discrete values.
Do opposites attract? Apparently not. This study of an online dating service measures the importance of a matching characteristic when choosing a partner. The data is extracted from the contacts initiated by the users.
| Characteristic | Increased Contact | Marital status | 1.64x | Wants children | 1.54x | Number of children | 1.39x |
| Physical build | 1.28x |
| Smoking | 1.25x |
| Physical appearance | 1.23x |
| Educational level | 1.19x |
| Religion | 1.17x |
| Race | 1.14x |
| Drinking habits | 1.12x |
| Pet preferences | 1.11x |
| Pets owned | 1.08x |
Demographic findings in this study:
- 62.8% of members were male and 37.2% were female, but 55% of active members were female
- The median age for men was 36 and women was 33
- 78.2% of messages were never responded to
- Members sent an average of 1.5 messages
- Men initiated 73.3% of messages, but their initiations were 17.9% less likely to be reciprocated
A more detailed analysis of online dating is given in the author’s thesis.
I found this paper by browsing the list of Judith Donath’s students, who was also one of my professor’s advisor. Fiore’s Masters Thesis was about online dating — I bet that made for interesting party conversation.
Fiore, A. T. & Donath, J. S. (2005). Homophily in Online Dating: When Do You Like Someone Like Yourself?. Proceedings from CHI ‘05: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1371-1374. [PDF]
I am a veteran of Internet Dating and Social Networkinng sites. I have tried almost all the services out there. Starting from v-india, match.com, fropper, eHarmony, etc. to the more recent web 2.0 ones: myspace, bebo, orkut, zorpia etc. There were many forgettable ones in between (lovehappens, friendster, ringo etc.). I have also tried out some of the Indian online marriage classified sites: Rediff Matchmaker, JeevanSathi etc. Given this background, I consider myself as a seasoned campaigner (maybe I should start a wiki about how to make these services work for you; there lies a profession in there!).
But IMHO none of them address the basic issue Return on Investment (RoI). Males are meant to pursue females. Thats the way we are built and the way our society works. Given a 50:50 ratio of both sexes, each girl will get requests from at least 10 to 25 % of the guys on the site. Which creates 1) a problem of choice for the girl (if she is indeed looking for a date) 2) spam (if she is not eg. on SocNet sites). This phenomenon is most visible on Orkut (at least amongst Indians). All the girls on Orkut get hundreds of friend requests from guys looking for a date. The more attractive looking female gets more requests. Some girls refuse flatly, some check out the profile once before refusing and sometimes, once in a while, she accepts! As usual the odds are stacked against the males here as well. The hit rate is around 1 % and the chances of some action is even lower; around 0.01%.
That is simply too low. It results in too much hard work without a guaranteed RoI. The traditional methods have much better hit rates. Ask your friends, join a salsa class or just randomly approach girls on the street (yup, i have done that too). To make these SocNet sites work, they have to increase the odds against the guys. The service has to assume that there will be more guys on the site and each guy would preferably want to try out all the attractive looking girls out there (why not!). Its job should be ensure that he has a fair chance of accomplishing that.
And the best way to do that is to offer incentive to the girls. A rewards based system in which the girls would want to interact with the guys since its in their interest. Feed their greed (gifts, shopping vouchers, talk time on mobiles etc.) and make them more responsive. Leave the rest up to the guy. Its up to him to get a date after that! Given a large and diverse userbase, such a system would end up being much more effective. After some hits and misses, you might just bump into your soul mate and she will at least reply back once (trust me, that is a big step). Its a win-win situation either ways: the guys get to romance a bit, and the girl gets some real meat out of it.
AFAIK there are no incentive based Internet dating services yet. There are numerous methods of implementing such a service. Make the guys pay during registration, distribute it to the girls when they actually respond to guys and keep a commission for yourself. Have a concept of virtual money which can be encashed with real money. Have a phone based system where the guys actually pay twice the amount to talk to the girl. Create implementations which caters to niche user groups. The underlying concept remains the same. The females are rewarded and the males pay for that.
It would be an interesting experiment to try out at least. Maybe I should talk to a VC. And get this patented as well. In case I don’t get the funding, I’ll at least become rich if someone else does! That would also automatically ensure me a date 
.
I am really interested in studies regarding matchmaking and dating ( I have worked on one of the leading matchmaking sites). What I feel is this – as comprehensive the machmaking process is, response from girl’s side will be better.
The idea of incentives is great if it is a pure dating site.
But more than incentives, you should give a non-materialistic reason to contact guys directly.
Why don’t girls respond that much? Many reasons.
1) Lack of trust.
2) Waiting for a better ‘offer’ (a.k.a Choosy)
3) just feeling ‘all are flirts’.
May be we should think baout these more. my 2 cents
Update: Some assumptions validated in study.
