Freaky online dating economics!
I read a fantastic book whilst on holiday recently, it’s on pretty much all bookstore shelves at the moment and is called ‘Freakonomics’. The book analyses day to day trends and makes some fascinating observations about all kinds of things like why most drug dealers live with their mothers, why crime halved in the USA in the mid 90s etc. Anyway, go read it it’s loads of fun.
The reason I am writing about it is that Steven Levitt (author) discusses online dating trends which was, like the rest of the book, an eye opener!
Therefore I wanted to share it and summarise below for you:
A man who doesn’t submit a photo on a dating site gets only one fourth the volume of e-mail responses as a man who does.
A woman who doesn’t include her photo gets only one-sixth the response.
A low income, poorly educated, unhappily employed, not very attractive, slightly overweight and balding man who posts his photo stands a better chance of getting an email than a man earning $200,000, and is deadly handsome but doesn’t have a photo!
57% of men who post a profile don’t receive one email.
23% of women who post a profile don’t receive one email.
Men who say they want a long-term relationship do much better than men looking for a casual relationship, but women who say they are looking for casual love do amazingly well!
For men, women’s looks are incredibly important, whilst a man’s income is more important to the woman.
In the experiment (on a dating site) roughly 50% of women and 80% of men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response date told a different story – The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90% of their email queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 95% of their queries to white men.
There is loads of other really cool information in this book and if you read one thing this year try picking this up!
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READER COMMENTS:
Great book.
They have an excellent blog as well:
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/
Posted by Pete on Tue 17th October 2006 at 07:53 AM | #