Not content with relying on Happen Magazine or any of the other dating site companion publications, consumers are adopting a more Do It Yourself approach by taking the business of online dating research into their own hands. Be forewarned, if you’re looking for peer reviewed science, you’re going to be disappointed. Not that we have much publicly available information to compare the results with.
If you want to buy into the party line at eHarmony Labs or a random dating tips site, which are often merely affiliate marketing sites regurgitating the same dozen or so tired dating tips, knock yourself out and good luck.
Or you can join the vanguard of bloggers who are taking dating sites to task for their claims, or simply performing basic research out of their interest in how online dating sites operate. There is no motive besides curiosity, yet.
Take for example the adage that adding photos to your profile increased the likelihood that someone will contact you by what, 15%? Where did this number come from? Is it even remotely accurate?what is the optimum number of photos to have on a profile, or does it not matter?
A few months ago an online dating executive sent me a link to http://plentyoffishdating.blogspot.com. I filed it away and forgot about it until the author contacted me this week.
Just wanted to send a quick email to share an interesting little experiment I did on plentyoffish.com. Basically I went and collected data from 400 different profiles and studied the correlation between the quantity of pictures displayed and the attraction level of the profile. You can see my post about it here:
http://plentyoffishdating.blogspot.com/2009/02/plenty-of-fish-picture-experiment.html
It’s not super scientific, but I think it’s interesting none the less. Anyways, just wanted to share that with you and perhaps get your thoughts on it.
This dovetails nicely with yesterday’s post about a guy who did his own Chemistry.com review. I enjoy reading what actual users of online dating sites are learning as part of the ever-growing Do It Yourself culture. The information shared by bloggers like this tends to come across as more authentic than approved-by-marketing blog posts. That is of course unless it’s a shill planted by dating sites themselves. The results may not be entirely accurate, but over time I think we are going to see trends emerge that previously have been discussed only behind the corporate firewall at major dating sites. How do we know whether or not this information could be helpful to members if we’ve never seen the data?
Think about how Facebook exposes a considerable amount of information about how members use the site. They have a platform to develop on, services like Appsaholic to track popularity of applications and myriad feeds and privacy tools. Compare that to transparency exhibited by a top-10 dating site. No contest.
Remove the scammers, spammers, escorts, married people and stale profiles from most dating sites and you’re left with a decidedly different community. Dating sites don’t want to be too transparent because if you really knew how inefficient they are, the fear is that less people would sign up. I’ll say it again, The Fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear as in, we don’t know what’s going to happen and we’re not going to take a chance because no one else is. This mindset is what keeps the current dating industry stagnant and drives new upstarts to take a run at unseating the competition.
I completely understand the fear rationale. Most dating sites are based on the premise of growing traffic initially at whatever cost, by whatever means necessary, ignore new features and problems and deal with it later, if ever. SinglesNet is a great example of this. This is simply what it takes to get ahead in online dating. It’s a marketing game, plain and simple.
It’s my belief that dating sites which are open to change, blog about their business and make at least some of their results public are going to be truly successful, at least in my book. Traffic != success to consumers. Success to them means getting off dating sites as quickly as possibly and never having to come back.
If you have, or are working on some aspect of homebrew online dating research, I would be happy to link to your findings.
