I did a little online dating experiment to see what response rate I would get. In this take I'll share my experiment and the results.
Hypothesis:
-Online dating is bullshit.
Parameters:
-If less than 10% of women respond then online dating is crap.
-If more than 10% of women respond then online dating may not be crap.
Methodology:
-Before starting, create and update my profile as best as I can but then do not change it throughout the experiment.
-Website used: pof.com
-Location used: Ontario, Canada (i.e. only messaged girls in this area)
-Message 100 different women with a short message such as “hello” and use the same message for each girl. (Footnote: had to vary the messages slightly as pof would not let me do too many repeat, copy&paste style messages)
-Wait one week and then count how many women responded.
Further Research:
-For those that do respond, see if they would carry on a conversation and for how long they would carry on a conversation.
Data:
-To avoid messaging the same person twice I had to record usernames, but I won't share that here. I had a chart of usernames, day that I messaged them, and whether or not they responded.
Results/Discussion:
Over the course of two days I messaged 100 girls. My overall response rate was 9%, which by my parameters would mean that online dating is bullshit.
Interestingly, the response rate from the first 50 was 6% but for the second 50 it was 12%. To message more people, and meet my target of 100, I had to lower my standards - which means that as you lower your standards your response rate will increase.
For those that did respond, the highest number of responses I got from a single girl was 4 - still not much of a conversation. For the first half my average number of responses (from 3 people) was 1.33. For the second half my average number of responses (from 6 people) was 2.17. So while my initial response rate increased upon lowering my standards, the extent of conversation did not increase substantially.
Afterthoughts:
-In my experiment I should have also included response latency. Maybe next time I'll do that, if I make another experiment out of it.
-Do you think that a response rate of 9% is high or low for a guy?
-Is it worth lowering your standards to get a higher response rate?
-Were there any flaws to my methodology? If yes, then how would you do the experiment differently?
-What are your experiences with online dating?
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