OkCupid

Sometimes it seems like there are more people claiming to be experts on dating than there are actual people dating.

(Do I fit into that category? Don’t answer that. Let me retain my illusions of usefulness.)

Most of them are probably hacks making things up or regurgitating tired advice they read in Cosmo, but a few - a special few - are genuine experts who deserve their guru status. And few fit that description better than Christian Rudder, the data whiz behind OkCupid’s legendary OkTrends blog and recent author of a piece in The Guardian.

“I have led OkCupid’s analytics team since 2009, and my job is to make sense of the data our users create,” Rudder writes. “As people bring technology deeper and deeper into their lives, it can show us profound and ridiculous things about who we are as human beings.”

Anyone else loving the sound of “profound and ridiculous” as much as I am? I have to know: what exactly does OkCupid know that we normal folks don’t? Rudder was kind enough to offer a few examples:

1. Women have a sensible approach to ageing. You wouldn’t know it from watching The Real Housewives, but apparently women are actually pretty down-to-earth about the ageing process. At least where choosing a partner is concerned. On the whole, at every stage of her life, a woman prefers a man who is roughly as old as she is. On the other hand…
2. Men get older, but they don’t really grow up. It sounds like a tired stereotype, but in this case it seems to be true. Whether men are in their 20s, 30s, 40s - or even at 50 - they strongly prefer women in their early 20s. 20 and 21 are the most favored ages, though a few men are willing to go as high as 23 or 24. Yikes.
3. White people are really obsessed with their hair. After looking at 3.2 billion words of profile text, Rudder found that the top five phrases for white men and women include multiple references to their hair (plus prog-rock and outdoor activities). For other large racial and ethnic groups on OkCupid, hair is rarely a topic of discussion. For example:

• Black men: dreads, Jill Scott, Haitian, soca, neo soul
• Latino men: Colombian, salsa merengue, cumbia, una, merengue bachata
• Asian men: tall for an Asian, Asians, Taiwanese, Taiwan, Cantonese

For more dating secrets from OkCupid's resident data expert, stay tuned for Part II and check out Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking).

In further proof that the Internet is a fickle, fleeting place, it seems everyone has already forgotten about a piece of news no one could stop talking about just a few months ago.

Back in June, Facebook caused a major public outcry when it revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million users as part of a psychological study to examine how emotions spread on social media. It was a messy situation, to put it lightly, and not long afterwards we found out Facebook wasn’t the only site to experiment on its users.

OkCupid came forward to say that it, too, had manipulated users’ experience - but that it wasn’t really sorry about it. The site’s blog post made the (valid) point that “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.” Websites - especially dating websites - have to perform tests, otherwise they’d never be able to improve and make the user’s experience as good as it can possibly be.

So when it came down to the question of whether or not you should be upset by Facebook and OkCupid’s actions, opinion was divided.

A University of Maryland law professor is now claiming that Facebook and OkCupid violated a state law when they manipulated customer data as part of company research. Professor James Grimmelmann says the two websites are in violation of a 2002 Maryland law that requires all research on human subjects to have informed consent of the those involved, as well as approval by an ethical review panel.

In response, Facebook’s spokesman Israel Hernandez maintains that the company did not break federal or Maryland law, but says it is examining its internal processes. “We know some people were upset by this study and we are taking a hard look at our internal processes as a result,” Hernandez wrote in an email to the Washington Post. “The requirements specified by the federal Common Rule and Maryland law do not apply to research conducted under these circumstances.”

The allegations are now in the hands of Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, who told the Washington Post, “They’ve already discontinued doing this, so what we’d want to do is talk to them and figure out whether or not what they did was appropriate, whether there was enough notice given to users and whether or not they intend to do something like this again in the future without violating privacy concerns and without giving the ability to opt in or opt out of the testing.”

I could say something about how hard IAC/InterActiveCorp is trouncing the competition, but…um… It hardly has any competition. The media conglomerate, helmed by Barry Diller, has been killing it in the online dating realm for years and shows no signs of stopping.

Thanks to its two massive dating sites, Match.com and OkCupid, IAC was already the biggest player in the game when it decided to shake things up last December by creating a special division for its online dating holdings called the Match Group.

This year, IAC has made more powerful strides in its quest to dominate online dating. It increased its majority stake in Tinder, the mobile app at the top of the mobile dating heap, and acquired most of the Brooklyn-based dating site HowAboutWe.

Slowly but surely, IAC has bought its way into the dating market. By the end of 2013, IAC reportedly hosted 30 million active users throughout its dating properties, 3.4 million of whom are paying subscribers. The Match Group is now responsible for approximately one quarter of IAC's total revenue. And they're not shy about singing their own praises.

“We are not just the acquirer of choice,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the Match Group, “we are the only acquirer.”

Investors, on the other hand, are a little more wary. Analysts are convinced that online dating's growth is likely to slow, despite the fact that the market has never been stronger in the US or abroad. The primary bump in the road is free mobile dating services, which are making it increasingly difficult for other dating services to generate a profit.

Mobile dating now accounts for around 27% of dating site services. As mobile audiences grow, dating sites are finding it challenging to turn those users into paying members. They are also challenged by a crowded market, which becomes more congested all the time as various niche sites pop up. Although many don't last for long, they're still successful in drawing audiences away from larger, more general dating sites.

With that in mind, IAC’s future may lie in Tinder. So far the app has put growth above revenue, but it is estimated that Tinder could eventually earn $75 million a year. First, the company has to figure out how to monetize it without losing users or slowing growth. Yagan is feeling positive about the future.

“It is not a winner take all dynamic,” he said. “There is a lot of concurrent usage. Unlike a car, the majority of online daters use multiple products, so you want to have a portfolio — a multibranded approach.”

One of the most famous posts ever featured on OKCupid’s beloved OkTrends blog was a massive examination of the ways race and ethnicity affect the online dating experience. It was one of the very first OkTrends posts ever made, way back in 2009, but the issues are still relevant today. Writer Christian Rudder has decided to revisit them in an updated post for 2014.

Back in 2009, race and attraction on OkCupid looked like this:

• Non-black men discriminated against black women
• But black men showed little racial preference either way
• All women preferred to date men of their own race
• But otherwise, they consistently discriminated against Asian and black men

So the big question is: has anything changed?

In the last five years, OkCupid users haven’t had any epiphanies of open-mindedness. In fact, Rudder notes, racial bias may have intensified a bit. See the second chart here for a demonstration.

What has noticeably changed are people's answers to match questions like "Is interracial marriage a bad idea?" and "Do you strongly prefer to date someone of your own race?" The percentage of users answering YES to those questions has been slowly trending downwards, although their actual behavior has stayed the same.

This prompts a few other questions, like:

• Are people on OkCupid just racist?
• Is it possible that a small number of users is throwing off the averages?
• Does preferring to date partners of a specific race mean you’re racist?
• Is data from an online dating site even relevant in the real world?

Rudder has all the answers.

• No, OkCupid users are no more or less racist than anyone else. Online dating data shows consistent results where race is concerned, regardless of the dating site in question. The same basic biases can be found everywhere.

• Again, these biases exist throughout the research on race and dating, not just on OkCupid. It therefore highly unlikely that a small portion of OkCupid users are affecting the data in a significant way.
• You don't have control over what foods you like and which you don't, and the same goes for your personal preferences in your dating life. Most everyone has a "type" of some kind, and it probably isn't something you actively chose. However, Rudder writes, "the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—says something about race’s role in our society.”
• There are plenty of situations that aren't romantic that still bear a resemblance to dating. Any time you're trying to make an impression on a stranger, you're essentially going on a first date. “Beauty is a cultural idea as much as a physical one,” Rudder explains, “and the standard is of course set by the dominant culture.” So sure…it's just dating data, but it reveals our definition of beauty and that's something that affects everyone, everywhere.

If you were a fan of the OkTrends blog – and let’s be real, who wasn’t? – your day is about to get a little better. Though the brilliant blog is no more, its writer, Christian Rudder, has plenty more to say on the subject of the human side of Big Data. He has just released a new book that explores who we are in a world in which we make an increasing amount of data about ourselves available online.

The book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Sites like OkCupid collect vast amounts of information on their users in order to provide better service, and in doing so raise some interesting questions. Rudder believes the info isn’t just useful for the websites – he also believes it may change the way we see ourselves.

That being said, he readily admits that data isn’t everything. "Look,” he told NPR's Arun Rath, “there's no way OkCupid, Facebook, Twitter, these sites even added all together can stand in for the entirety of the human condition. People do all kinds of things they don't do online." But it would be silly to let all that data go to waste, wouldn’t it?

Rudder has examined everything from age, to race, to gender, to language, to attraction. His findings are consistently fascinating for both data geeks and non-data geeks alike, such as:

• There is a strong bias against African American users on online dating sites. They are rated lower, receive fewer messages, and are less often replied to than people of other races. Online daters of both genders tend to prefer to date within their own racial or ethnic group.
• Contrary to popular belief, women don’t prefer older men. Until women reach the age of 40, they are more interested in men in their age range. On the other hand, men across the board show a preference for younger women. 20-year-old female users were reliably rated highest by men of all ages.

As fascinating as Rudder’s analysis is, it has its limitations. There are potential hazards to taking consumer data collected for a specific purpose and using it to extract meaning about something else. Data also isn’t necessarily indicative of behavior. In the case of OkCupid’s users, it may measure opinions but not actual actions. Still, Rudder firmly believes collecting this kind of information is worthwhile.

“I definitely think it's good,” he told NPR. “When you put all this stuff together, you're able to look at people in a way that people have never been able to look at people before. ... You have millions and millions of people living their lives through an interface that records what they're doing as they live. ... It's the beginning of, I think, a revolution in how social science and behavioral science are done.”

Ever wanted to get inside the minds of thousands of daters to see what makes everyone tick? Maybe that seems cool, or maybe you’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair for five hours, but either way – it does make you curious.

So it’s no surprise that OkCupid Co-Founder Christian Rudder has decided to harness the power of OkCupid’s user data and create a book that piques our curiosity. After all, we all watched with fascination as the dating site’s blog OkTrends revealed its latest research, informing us of what types of people we are attracted to, we’re doing wrong in our online dating profiles, or how to effectively message other users. Rudder found interesting trends in the details, helping us ask questions we didn’t even know to ask. For instance, why does the angle of the camera matter in a photo, or how you smile? Why is it preferable to write a less descriptive profile? Why is it more attractive to have a guitar in your hand than a tennis racket, or possess an unusually-shaped nose than to be considered average-looking? Or the million-dollar question: what do people lie about the most when they are online dating?

OkCupid has given us the sometimes surprising preferences of online daters, based on all of the data they mine from their thousands of users. Because of the site’s format of creative questions and answers, it’s allowed them to dig deeper than most.

OkTrends has been on hiatus since 2011, when Rudder started taking the information to compile it into a book, rather than just posting the information for free on their website. Rudder’s new book is called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), which comes out on Sept. 9 and examines interactions for insights into whom and how we date.

For one of Dataclysm’s studies, Rudder analyzed how men and women approach attraction. It turns out that as women get older, they like older men. Men, on the other hand, consistently prefer younger and younger women. Men will message women close to their own age, but only up to a point. For example, men in their mid-40s rarely talk to women older than 30. “We have a lot of serial daters on the site—men who just keep dating women 10 years younger than they are,” Rudder told Business Week in a recent interview. “Eventually their tactics start to fail, and the young ladies they’re messaging begin rejecting them. The result is a lot of 40-year-old men and women who find it hard to get a date.”

OkCupid isn’t worried about user backlash for mining their personal data. Rudder recently wrote a post to address this issue, pointing out that all websites experiment on users, admitting that OkCupid once tested its matchmaking algorithm by telling users who were not suited for each other that they were a near-perfect match. “We got maybe five complaints,” Rudder told Business Week.

Since OkCupid users don’t pay for the site or its advice, does Rudder have an audience willing to buy his book? We’ll have to wait and see.

Check out our review of OkCupid for more information on this popular dating site.