Statistics

It's Just Lunch partnered with American Way In Flight Magazine to poll airline passengers about dating. One of the first question they asked passengers is, how long does it take them to decide on the first date whether they will go on a second date with the person?

• 13 percent would give their date longer than 1 hour.
• 22 percent usually gives a date 1 hour.
• 66 percent of respondents said in the first half hour of meeting a person is when they decide if they will ever go out with the person again.
• 16 percent said they decide in 5 minutes.
• A further 5 percent know right away.

The new OkCupid blog called OkTrends had an interesting first post which looked at members sending messages on their dating site. I was surprised by the fact that only 32 percent of first messages (the person who initiated contact) ever got a reply. This is less than a third of all first contacts, and this is on a dating site which is mostly free.

Based on crunching data from tens of thousands of sent messages OkCupid spotted a sweet spot on message length and the chance of a man or woman replying to your message. The first thing they found was that most single's first time messages are way too long.

Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words), and the average is 743! At least in terms of using your time efficiently, your messages should be much shorter.

What they found is, on average for a man to write to a woman, a message should be about 200 characters in length. This will give him the best conversion rate of 17.1% based on the average amount of time it takes a man to write a message. For example at this message length the average male online dater can scan profiles and write 10 messages in 1 hour giving them on average, 1.71 replies to their 10 messages.

For women message length is even shorter. A message length of only 50 characters gives woman a conversion rate of 30 percent. This means they can send 11.4 messages per hour and expect on average to receive 3.42 replies from men. First contact message from women seem to more serve the purpose of getting the man to notice their profile, rather than convey any real information.

For the full dating advice article, read OkTrends and to find out more information about this dating site read our review of OkCupid.com.

An interesting press release went out claiming that the Chinese dating site Zhenai.com is now the largest in the world. Zhenai first started 11 years ago, in May of 1998 as a free dating site called 96333.com. In 2005 they rebranded as Zhenai.com (which means "cherished love") and now has about 20 million registered members and claims that daily, another 40,000 singles signup. Zhenai's largest demographic are singles who are 25 to 45 years old, who live in an urban area, and are white-collar professionals. More than 85% of these members have a bachelor's, master's or doctoral diploma. Zehnai expects its number of registered members to hit 30 million by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Zhenai claims to be the world's largest dating site by surpassing Match.com which had 15,000,000 registered members and a daily increment of 60,000 new members in May of 2009 (Note: Match.com now claims 20,000 new members a day). The problem is Zhenai switched a few of Match.com's numbers around. Match.com actually claims to have had more than 100 million registered users between 2000 and 2008 (see Press Release). That doesn't even include the profiles registered in the 5 years from when Match.com first launched in 1995. In the Zehnai press release, they are using Match.com current number of members which accounts for 15 million. I believe Match.com defines a current member as someone who has logged in at least once during the last year. I have a feeling that Zhenai is including all registered members since the launch of their dating site and only used the lower Match.com current registered members numbers to highlight their claim that they are the largest dating site.

The Forbes website wrote an article called "The Top Online Meat Markets" which talks a bit about some current online dating statistics and lists the top ten dating sites according to unique visitors in the month of June from a tracking company called Nielsen (more famously known for tracking TV viewers). I wasn't really impressed with the title since they are referring to dating sites as meat markets. The term meat market is not meant as a compliment and it tells me the author is not very interested in the story and doesn't think much of the concept of online dating. He further expresses his point of view in this sentence:

Call it calculating, unromantic and maybe even a bit unnatural ...

For a media company whose authors are suppose to leave their opinions at the door unless the topic calls for it, I wonder how this piece got past the editor's desk.

In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina reported rape cases are up 16 percent this year. The county has a population of almost 1 million people and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police are blaming "Internet dating and online classifieds offering sexual services" as one of the main reasons for the rise in rape cases. Across America the number of reported rapes has increased by 30 percent since 1993. Part of these increases are attributed to less shame in the social stigma of being a victim and in the city of Charlotte's case, stepped up outreach programs.

The Charlotte police have also contacted Craigslist,

... asking the online posting company to warn women advertising personal services that Charlotte had become too dangerous for them.

In Mecklenburg, the previous 2 years saw a downward trend in rape cases but with the rise this year, the police are for some reason pointing the finger at adult Internet dating services. Online dating is not, new and has been very popular over the last 5 years. With Craigslist in the news lately (see Story) I think they were just an easy target for the police to lay blame. Craigslist is of course not completely blameless here and it is well known they are having problems with illegal services being posted in their online personals category, it's just that these problems have been going on for a number of years, not just in the last year when Mecklenburg County has seen the rise in reported rapes.

People Media, in association with Chicago market researcher Synovate, released the results of a national wide survey of 1,000 people conducted last month which shows 49% of Americans knows of someone who found a date online. This statistic has almost doubled since a 2006 survey done by Pew Internet & American Life. It was also found, in the age demographic of Americans who goes online the least, people 65 or more, that almost a third (31 percent) knew of someone who had found a date online.

From the survey, it was also found that 28 percent of the respondents knew more than one person who found at least one date online:

• 3.4% knew more than 5 people
• 4% knew 4 or 5 people
• 20.7% knew 2 or 3 people
• 20.6% knew 1 person

A few more interesting details from the results include, singles are more likely to know someone who dated someone they found online, when compared to a person who is married (55% compared to 44%). Similarly Caucasians were more likely than other ethnicities to know someone who found a date on the internet (51% compared to 40%).

To find out more about a few of People Media's dating sites, read our review of BlackPeopleMeet.com and our review of SeniorPeopleMeet.com.