OkCupid

Sam Yagan, the CEO of massive online dating biz Match Group (which owns Tinder and Match.com), and the cofounder of OkCupid, recently participated in a Reddit AMA to, um, interesting results.

The big thing making news is his answer to a query from Reddit user jairachi: “Being the CEO of a group that discernably specialises in finding love, have you personally used any of your services and subsequently found success?”

Yagan responded with the following bit of OkCupid trivia: “None of the four founders has ever been on an online date of any kind.”

It sounds scandalous, but before you make wisecracks about about Yagan's “ringing endorsement” of his services, read his explanation: “We were all dating our future wives when we started OkC. And before that, we were basically in college where online dating wasn't really pervasive.”

Yagan had a few other insights to add during his AMA. When asked if the free model of OkCupid attracts a different type of user than Match's subscription fee, Yagan said “Each dating product attracts a different user, and "freeness" is just one component (Tinder & OkC attract different users; Match and OurTime attract different users, etc.). So, yes, Match users and OkC users are different. I hate talking about "better quality" when referring to human beings, but it is true that people who pay for Match likely have higher intent than people on OkCupid or Tinder.”

Perhaps his most intriguing anwser came in response to the question “Is online dating 'good' for society? Why or why not, and what are the potential unintended consequences of this behavior?” Yagan thoughtfully replied that he believes dating apps make society better in three ways:

1. “Undoubtedly, greater choice leads to the selection of higher quality spouses.”
2. “Technology makes it easier to meet people who are less similar (farther away, different socioeconomic levels, different ethnicity, etc.).“
3. “The ease of getting back in the dating market makes empowers people in bad relationships to leave them, knowing that loneliness isn't the only alternative to their current situation.”

But it wasn't all smooth sailing for Sam. The Reddit community felt he left a few choice questions unanswered – naturally, the difficult or controversial ones – and was none too pleased about it.

Unfortunately, Yagan didn't respond to inquiries about spam emails, Facebook linking, and fake accounts. Fortunately, Reddit responded in its typically dry, hilarious style. “So, just like on Okcupid, you respond a couple times and disappear?” wrote user orangefolders.

“That's pretty much how those dating thing work, you only respond to those you want, and the moment it doesn't go your way, you stop responding altogether,” replied MonsterBlash.

Online dating is a world of contradictions.

Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid, is responsible for one of the most successful dating sites in the world – yet he has never been on a date with someone he met online. There is nothing more human or more inexplicable than romance – and yet Rudder seems to have turned emotions into science and found a formula for love.

Christian Rudder is the man behind the OkTrends blog, which he recently spun into a book called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Miraculously, though it's hard to imagine anything colder or more impersonal than numbers, Rudder has managed to find humanity in his work. In his hands, data becomes revelations about human nature.

Amongst his findings was the not-so-surprising news that, no matter how old men get, they always find 22-year-old women most attractive. Women, on the other hand, tend to be most attracted to men around their own age. Rudder also caused a flurry of media attention when he reported that people typically rate potential matches of their own ethnicity as more attractive than others.

Naturally, claims like those don't come without controversy or criticism. Some have accused Rudder of presenting a damaging reductionist view of human behavior. Others have said it's impossible to understand what people want from love and sex via a faceless website in an industry that has a bad reputation for telling lies.

Not to mention the constant stories of outrage we hear over surveillance of citizens' Internet activities, or of exhaustion over companies using personal data for marketing purposes. In a world where privacy is increasingly a concern, studying the habits of OkCupid users may seem like a misinformed choice. And if that seems like a misinformed choice, imagine the backlash after telling OkCupid users that they'd been experimented on.

In 2014, the discontinued OkTrends blog returned from a long hiatus with a posted called “We Experiment On Human Beings!” The response felt predictably fierce to most of us, but Rudder maintains he was surprised by just now negative the public's reaction was. To him, it was merely the cost of admission: users get a free site, and in return they share their data.

To his credit, Rudder is happy to admit that the facts shared in his book are only “tiny windows looking in on our lives.” Data science is interesting, but not perfect. Ultimately, he believes his purpose is good and that the end of furthering social science fully justifies the means.

Dating website OkCupid has always been considered more cutting edge among the most popular online dating sites, and it is maintaining this effective strategy. Now, the company is offering its users even more choices when it comes to how they gender-identify, and what their sexual preferences are.

OkCupid’s main appeal is its approach to online dating, much more progressive than traditional sites, and also more fun to navigate. People are encouraged ask each other questions and be more original and unique without being forced to just fill in the blanks for their profiles or being walked through a long questionnaire.  

In other words, instead of being “guided” through a process, OkCupid users have always been given a little more freedom to interact and express themselves how they’d like. This works for users, and it works for OkCupid, too. The company started a blog using data from its own user base that reveals online dating trends and preferences that have come in very handy over the years. It helped OkCupid to offer a premium paid service based on the things people want – like filtering out people who don’t fit their physical ideals. One of its founders recently published a book with his findings about patterns and habits of people who online date, gained from tracking its own users.

So it is only fitting that OkCupid would be on the forefront of offering more choices when it comes to dating and how people describe themselves and what they want. After all, we don’t fit into neat little boxes, especially when it comes to love.

OkCupid’s first new offering allows people more choices for how they identify themselves, other than just as “man” or “woman.” Gender has now been extended to include agender, androgynous, cis man, cis woman, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, hjra, intersex, trans man, trans woman and two spirit, among others.

A person’s sexual orientation is no longer limited to straight, gay, and bi-sexual. Now users can choose among an abundance of choices, including asexual, demisexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, pansexual, queer, questioning and sapiosexual (one who finds intelligence to be the most important sexual trait).

Right now, these options have only been rolled out to a limited number of users, and the company hasn’t announced when (or if) they will be extending it to all users.

According to website NewNowNext, users were notified of the change in a message from OkCupid: “You’re part of a select group with access to this feature. Keep in mind as we continue to work on this feature: For now, editing your gender and orientation is only supported on the desktop site.”

OkCupid has a reported 3.5 million user base.

IAC has released third quarter 2014 results. Revenue for the quarter totaled $782.2 million, up from $756.9 million in Q3 2013.

In the third quarter of 2014, consolidated revenue for IAC increased 3% year-over-year driven by solid growth at The Match Group and strong growth at Vimeo and HomeAdvisor. The Match Group revenue increased 12%, driven by 9% growth in paid subscribers to its dating websites. They now number over 3.6 million globally. Contributions from The Princeton Review and FriendScout24 – acquired on August 1, 2014 and August 31, 2014, respectively – also played large roles in The Match Group's success in Q3 2014.

Several other important segments also ended in the green, making Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA the dark spot in an otherwise-bright quarter. Third quarter adjusted-EBITDA was $135 million, down 18% from the third quarter of 2013. However, it was down only 1% when excluding approximately $14 million in net gains related to asset sales and the impact of around $13 million of acquisition-related differed revenue write-downs for the Princeton Review, FriendScout 24, and Slimwear.

Yep, you read that headline right. And the news comes straight from the mouth of Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid and writer of the OkTrends blog, so you know it's worth paying attention to.

Messages are usually the most private part of an online dating site, but Rudder gets special access and he's used it for another interesting wave of online dating research.

First, he took a look at the history of technology and how it altered the way we communicate. The notable moment came in 2008, when Apple launched the app store and everything went mobile. The effect on OkCupid users' writing was practically instantaneous. Smartphone-using singles started typing on teeny-tiny keyboards, and as a result message length has dropped by over two-thirds in the 6 years since.

These days, the average message is just over 100 characters. It seems like nothing, but users have adapted. Messages that get the highest response rate are now only 40-60 characters long.

Then Rudder examined how much putting time and effort into messages leads to better results. He looked at messages between 150 and 300 characters and plotted them against the time it took to write them. The outcome? Taking time to craft your messages helps, but only to a point. A peak is reached at around the 120-second mark, and after that you're just overthinking it.

There are also those out there who maximize their time by – sigh – cutting and pasting. And there are a lot of them. All told, 20% of the sample registered 5 or fewer keystrokes per message. “Sitewide,” writes Rudder, “the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.”

So there you have it. Like it or not, cut/paste is here to stay. It may be a little less effective, but it's far more efficient. Those who choose the CRTL + V strategy are actually just harnessing technology and hacking the online dating process – and doing so is probably making them far more successful than you, person who spends an hour personalizing every message.

RIP faith in humanity, hello more time to spend watching cat videos on YouTube.

There are few sources I trust to dish out genuinely good dating data, but Christian Rudder is at the top of the list. As one of the founders of OkCupid and the genius behind the OkTrends blog, Rudder has been granted an inside look at dating habits that no one can beat.

Recently, he turned that insider access into an article for The Guardian that exposes a few of the online dating secrets he’s learned over the years.

Did someone just talk about exposing secrets? Yep, it was me. Get hyped.

In case you missed it, head back to Part I for the first round of reveals from Rudder. If you’re all caught up, read on for the last 4 secrets to be spilled:

1. The British are really into Haribo and kebabs. Ok, that’s not exactly what Rudder said, but it’s close. Rudder compared Britain’s OkCupid profiles to those from the rest of the English-speaking world, and pulled out the words that are (at least according to his algorithms) most British.
   • The 30 words people in the UK use most when talking about themselves are: Newcastle, Bristol, wot, wasters, Camden, Brighton, tw*t, Portsmouth, Biffy, Clyro, trousers, trainers, Glasgow, feeder, Plymouth, consultancy, bloke, moaning, Haribo, kebab, nan, Ibiza, Essex, lecturer, Stereophonics, bolognese, Yorkshire, housemate, bugger, and sh*te.
2. Beauty is an exponential quantity on OkCupid. As attractiveness goes up, so does the number of messages received each week. It seems like basic logic, but Rudder takes it further. The data forms an exponential function - “That is,” he writes, “it obeys the same maths seismologists use to measure the energy released by earthquakes: beauty operates on a Richter scale. In terms of its effect, there is little noticeable difference between, say, a 1.0 and 2.0 – these cause tremors that vary only in degree of imperceptibility. But at the high end, a small difference has cataclysmic impact. A 9.0 is intense, but a 10.0 can rupture the world.”
3. Even when looking for a job, women are treated like they’re looking for a date. Rudder examined interview requests on ShiftGig and plotted the data against the attractiveness of the applicants. The male curve is linear, but the female curve is once again exponential - meaning that a man’s looks has no effect on his prospects, but a woman’s looks most certainly do.
4. The best questions to ask on a first date are probably not what you’re expecting. Two of OkCupid’s match questions stand out as being remarkably predictive of compatibility: “Do you like scary movies?” and “Have you ever traveled alone to another country?” In approximately ¾ of long-term couples who met on the site, both people answered those questions the same way - a much higher rate than expected. “In fact,” Rudder concludes, “successful couples agree on scary movies – either they both like them or they both hate them – about as often as they agree on the existence of God.”