Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Saturday, May 04 2013 @ 09:10 am
Last modified on
What do you do when you're 30, newly single, and totally over playing the field? If you're Amy Webb, digital media consultant and author of Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match[*1] , you decide to hack online dating.
After enduring a handful of disappointing dates, Webb knew she needed to rethink her approach to dating online. She turned to her background in data analysis to figure out exactly why her profile was attracting the wrong kind of man.
Webb began by listing the 72 different attributes she required in a partner. Some were obvious: he had to be smart and fun. Others were more specific: he had to share her appreciation for spreadsheets and be willing to listen to George Michael. When the list was completed, Webb broke her dealbreakers into a system of tiers. At the top were most important characteristics, ranked from 1-10. The result was a 1000-point scale that she could use to evaluate and categorize the men she dated.
For many of us, that's already thought and effort above and beyond the call of duty. But Webb didn't stop there. Before putting together her optimized profile, she set out to see things from the other side.
Posing as each of 10 male archetypes, Webb created profiles on JDate and spent the next month testing the online dating waters as a man. She studied the behaviors and habits of women on the site, collecting data like language used and number of hours elapsed before responding to a message.
"When I saw what was there, I was mortified and humiliated," Webb says. "I knew how bad my profile was, and what damage I'd done to myself because of what I posted. I had essentially copied and pasted my resumé."
She also discovered that the type of women her dream men were attracting fit a profile:
Armed with her new knowledge, Webb revamped her profile and woke up to 14 new messages and 68 views overnight. "Within a few days I was the most popular profile on the site. It was like I was the prom queen of JDate," she jokes. "I've never been that popular before. I probably never will be again."
Maybe not, but it doesn't matter anymore. She found her happy ending online, a man named Brian who became her last first date.