Statistics

It's one thing to speculate about what's going on with eHarmony these days, but it's quite another to hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

Ok, not a horse – Dr. Neil Clark Warren, CEO of eHarmony and instantly-recognizable white-haired man from the eHarmony commercials. On August 22nd, 2014, the 14th anniversary of eHarmony's founding, Warren sent an internal memo with an insider's look at the company he believes could become “one of the most important companies in the history of the world.”

Read the full thing www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/news/2014/10/eharmony-internal-memo.html and check out some of the highlights below:

• After nearly losing the company in 2012, eHarmony is back on track with a five-year turnaround plan.
• It wasn't easy. Board members were asked to step down, employees were fired, vendor contracts were terminated, and an all-new executive management team was put in place.
• Even some of eHarmony's top leadership changed. Grant Langston and Dan Erickson were appointed to the Management Team, and Armen Avedissian was hired as the new COO.
• Just two years in, the company is showing signs of a major comeback. “Instead of losing 100,000 end of period subscribers each year,” writes Warren, “suffering EBITDA losses of 50% every single year, our EBITDA for 2014 will literally be dramatic and the cash in the bank increasing substantially each month.” eHarmony's end of period paying subscriber count has hit an all-time high.
• A major move is in the works. eHarmony's offices will be relocating to prestigious digs on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
• The current business plan includes building ten separate relationship businesses with ten separate revenue streams.
• eHarmony intends to scale up by increasing its international reach. The company now employs 190 staff members in North America, the UK, and Australia, but hopes to reach other countries in the future – first in English, then in their native languages.
• Selling the company is definitely not part of the plan. “We do not ever again wish to expose the ownership and management of our business to persons who know almost nothing about relationships,” says Warren, “and have even less commitment to the sacredness of the relationships we are attempting to assist.”

Warren is feeling confident about the future of eHarmony. Maybe even a little over-confident, actually. Case in point:

“Bottom line, as a company, we want to bring about a world in which literally everyone has peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Then, we will know that we have reached our loftiest and most idealistic goals.”

Whew. “Idealistic” is right. But all the best to them, and if they get even halfway there, eHarmony will be a rousing success. For more on this dating site you can check out our eHarmony review.

According to Bloomberg News, the popular dating website Zoosk is scheduled to go public. The company filed earlier this year, but the latest stock market volatility might delay their offering until 2015.

Zoosk has long touted itself as a major contender in the online dating game due to its large international user base, alongside brands such as Match.com and OkCupid. The company has more than 27 million members across 80 countries, and the online dating market is reported to be worth $1.4 billion.

The appeal to investors goes beyond the revenues to be had in the online dating market. Zoosk company executives are betting on their extensive user base and tracking technology to help leverage their value. Unlike many online dating websites that rely on lengthy questionnaires and profile descriptions, Zoosk’s technology is purely behavior-based. That is, when users of the site navigate through profiles, send messages, or set filters to view other members, Zoosk is tracking this data and responding by providing matches that have similar behavior or seem most compatible. In other words, they are honing in to what users really want by seeing what they actually do online.

The more a user interacts with other members in the Zoosk community, the more Zoosk learns about that person to give them better matches. To the company’s benefit, it also gives them a wealth of data about their users, which is a valuable asset for investors.

Zoosk is also integrated so users can log in no matter what platform they are viewing on – phone, laptop, iPad or tablet, and is the #1 grossing online dating app in the iTunes store, according to its website. But its marketing expenses might be cutting into its revenue.

Website SeekingAlpha.com has been speculating about the opening price the company will decide upon, based on current statistics. Zoosk’s options granted in April 2014 had an exercise price of $7.72, so SeekingAlpha.com assumes the pricing discussions are in the range of $8-$16, which might not be an incentive for investors looking for a deal (and also looking at how the company can bring in more revenue). Right now, the dating app is free, but members pay to use features like messaging, chatting, and connecting with viewers who have viewed their profiles.

The opening price of the company’s stock is a matter of concern, but what does it mean to go public during such a risky market?

“Nobody wishes they went public today or over the last week,” Max Wolff, the chief economist at Manhattan Venture Partners, an investment firm focusing on late-stage private technology companies, told Bloomberg. “A regular bout of intense selling, like we’re seeing now, makes people feel like it’s smart to stay private longer.”

So the next move is up to Zoosk, but the company anticipates that investors are willing to bet on it.

Please read our Zoosk review for more information on this service.

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.”

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).

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.