online dating service

Online dating, also known as internet dating, virtual dating, or mobile app dating, is a method used by people with a goal of searching for and interacting with potential romantic or sexual partners, via the internet. An online dating service is a company that promotes and provides specific mechanisms for the practice of online dating, generally in the form of dedicated websites or software applications accessible on personal computers or mobile devices connected to the internet. A wide variety of unmoderated matchmaking services, most of which are profile-based with various communication functionalities, is offered by such companies.

Online dating services allow users to become "members" by creating a profile and uploading personal information including (but not limited to) age, gender, sexual orientation, location, and appearance. Most services also encourage members to add photos or videos to their profile. Once a profile has been created, members can view the profiles of other members of the service, using the visible profile information to decide whether or not to initiate contact. Most services offer digital messaging, while others provide additional services such as webcasts, online chat, telephone chat (VOIP), and message boards. Members can constrain their interactions to the online space, or they can arrange a date to meet in person.

A great diversity of online dating services currently exist. Some have a broad membership base of diverse users looking for many different types of relationships. Other sites target highly specific demographics based on features like shared interests, location, religion, sexual orientation or relationship type. Online dating services also differ widely in their revenue streams. Some sites are completely free and depend on advertising for revenue. Others utilize the freemium revenue model, offering free registration and use, with optional, paid, premium services. Still others rely solely on paid membership subscriptions.

Trends

Social trends and public opinions

A 2005 study found that online daters may have more liberal social attitudes compared to the general population in the United States.

Race and online dating

A 2009 study found that African Americans were the least desired demographic in online dating; and were the least interested in forming interracial relationships with non-Black Americans.

In 2008, a study investigated racial preferences using a sample of 6,070 profiles on Yahoo! Personals. Just 29% of white men excluded women of color, compared to the 64% of white women who excluded men of color. Follow-up studies conducted by these authors in 2009 and 2011 found similar patterns: white women were less open to interracial relationships than white men. "Earlier studies on racial preferences in online dating (Feliciano, Robnett, & Komaie, 2009; Robnett & Feliciano, 2011) collected data on stated race preferences (standardized tick boxes) from internet dating profiles on Yahoo! Personals, which was one of the major online dating services in the early 2000s. Regarding white majority users, Feliciano et al. (2009) could demonstrate, first, that race was a fundamental criterion for daters as preferences on race were expressed more frequently on other traits (e.g., education or religion). Second, they found decisive gender differences with (white) women being generally less open to non-white relationships than men and, compared to men, were much more likely to exclude Latino and Asian contacts. Robnett and Feliciano (2011) conducted a follow up study based on the same stated preference data but including minority racial groups as well...Gender and race-group interacted substantially"..."Taken together, the evidence garnered from stated preferences in online dating profiles suggests considerable racial hierarchies in dating but with different implications for race-gender groups due to substantive gender differences."

In 2018, a study analyzed the activity of approximately 200,000 users of an online dating app in the United States. The authors found that White men and Asian women were the most desired.

In 2021, a comprehensive analysis of online dating trends in the United States suggested that the rise of online dating has exacerbated underlying racial biases in dating. The authors found that White men were preferred by women of color, while men of color generally preferred women of color. White men were accepting of Asian and Hispanic women, yet White women tended to exclude non-White men.

However, these authors also disputed some common notions about racial bias in online dating. For example, White women did not reject Asian men more so than Black or Hispanic men. Black and Hispanic women were just as accepting of Asian men as they were of men of the same race. This is inconsistent with the idea that Asian men are particularly disadvantaged in online dating, relative to other men of color. The authors also dispute the notion that Asian women's high outmarriage rate is due to "self hatred", as their interviews found that these marriages form out of perceived compatibility, rather than self hatred. Gay Hispanic men did not have a preference for white partners.

Gender

According to a 2018 study, among American daters, male desirability increased until the age of 50; while women's desirability declined steeply after the age of 20.

In terms of educational attainment, men's desirability only increased the more educated they were. For women, however, educational attainment beyond the level of a bachelor's degree actually decreased their desirability. The authors suggested that besides individual preferences and partner availability, this pattern may be due to the fact that by the late 2010s, women were more likely to attend and graduate from university. In order to estimate the desirability of a given individual, the researchers looked at the number of messages they received and the desirability of the senders.

Developmental psychologist Michelle Drouin, who was not involved in the study, told ''The'' ''New York Times'' this finding is in accordance with theories in psychology and sociology based on biological evolution in that youth is a sign of fertility. She added that women with advanced degrees are often viewed as more focused on their careers than family. Licensed psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser told ''MarketWatch'' men typically prefer younger women because "they are more easy to impress; they are more (moldable) in terms of everything from emotional behavior to what type of restaurant to eat at," and because they tend to be "more fit, have less expectations and less baggage." On the other hand, women look for (financial) stability and education, attributes that come with age, said Kaiser. These findings regarding age and attractiveness are consistent with earlier research by the online dating services OKCupid and Zoosk.

In 2016, Gareth Tyson of the Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues published a paper analyzing the behavior of Tinder users in New York City and London. In order to minimize the number of variables, they created profiles of white heterosexual people only. For each sex, there were three accounts using stock photographs, two with actual photographs of volunteers, one with no photos whatsoever, and one that was apparently deactivated. The researchers pointedly only used pictures of people of average physical attractiveness. Tyson and his team wrote an algorithm that collected the biographical information of all the matches, liked them all, then counted the number of returning likes.

They found that men and women employed drastically different mating strategies. Men liked a large proportion of the profiles they viewed, but received returning likes only 0.6% of the time; women were much more selective but received matches 10% of the time. Men received matches at a much slower rate than women. Once they received a match, women were far more likely than men to send a message, 21% compared to 7%, but they took more time before doing so. Tyson and his team found that for the first two-thirds of messages from each sex, women sent them within 18 minutes of receiving a match compared to five minutes for men. Men's first messages had an average of a dozen characters, and were typical simple greetings; by contrast, initial messages by women averaged 122 characters.

Tyson and his collaborators found that the male profiles that had three profile pictures received far more matches than those without one. By sending out questionnaires to frequent Tinder users, the researchers discovered that the reason why men tended to like a large proportion of the women they saw was to increase their chances of getting a match. This led to a feedback loop in which men liked more and more of the profiles they saw while women could afford to be even more selective in liking profiles because of a greater probability of a match.

Aided by the text-analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, Bruch and Newman discovered that men generally had lower chances of receiving a response after sending more "positively worded" messages. When a man tried to woo a woman more desirable than he was, he received a response 21% of the time; by contrast, when a woman attempted to court a man, she received a reply about half the time. In fact, over 80% of the first messages in the data set obtained for the purposes of the study were from men, and women were highly selective in choosing whom to respond to, a rate of less than 20%. Therefore, studying women's replies yielded much insight into their preferences. Bruch and Newman were also able to establish the existence of dating 'leagues'. Generally speaking, people were able to accurately estimate where they ranked on the dating hierarchy. Very few responded to the messages of people less desirable than they were. Nevertheless, although the probability of a response is low, it is well above zero, and if the other person does respond, it can a self-esteem booster, said Kaiser. Co-author of the study Mark Newman told BBC News, "There is a trade-off between how far up the ladder you want to reach and how low a reply rate you are willing to put up with." Bruch and Newman found that while people spent a lot of time crafting lengthy messages to those they considered to be a highly desirable partner, this hardly made a difference, judging by the response rate. Keeping messages concise is well-advised. Previous studies also suggest that about 70% of the dating profile should be about oneself and the rest about the desired partner.

Data from the Chinese online dating giant Zhenai.com reveals that while men are most interested in how a woman looks, women care more about a man's income. Profession is also quite important. Chinese men favor women working as primary school teachers and nurses while Chinese women prefer men in the IT or finance industry. Women in IT or finance are the least desired. Zhenai enables users to send each other digital "winks". For a man, the more money he earns the more "winks" he receives. For a woman, her income does not matter until the 50,000-yuan mark (US$7,135), after which the number of "winks" falls slightly. Men typically prefer women three years younger than they are whereas women look for men who are three years older on average. However, this changes if the man becomes exceptionally wealthy; the more money he makes the more likely he is to look for younger women.

In general, people in their 20s employ the "self-service dating service" while women in their late 20s and up tend to use the matchmaking service. This is because of the social pressure in China on "leftover women" (Sheng nu), meaning those in their late 20s but still not married. Women who prefer not to ask potentially embarrassing questions – such as whether both spouses will handle household finances, whether or not they will live with his parents, or how many children he wants to have, if any – will get a matchmaker to do it for them. Both sexes prefer matchmakers who are women.

Desirability and physical appearance

At least three quarters of the sample surveyed attempted to date aspirationally, meaning they tried to initiate a relationship with someone who was more desirable, 25% more desirable, to be exact. Bruch recommended sending out more greeting messages, noting that people sometimes managed to upgrade their 'league'. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist not involved with the study, told ''The Atlantic'', "The idea that persistence pays off makes sense to me, as the online-dating world has a wider choice set of potential mates to choose from. The greater choice set pays dividends to people who are willing to be persistent in trying to find a mate." Using optimal stopping theory, one can show that the best way to select the best potential partner is to reject the first 37%, then pick the one who is better than the previous set. The probability of picking the best potential mate this way is 37%. (This is approximately the reciprocal of Euler's number, $e = \lim_ (1 + x)^ \approx 2.718281828$. See derivation of the optimal policy.) However, making online contact is only the first step, and indeed, most conversations failed to birth a relationship. As two potential partners interact more and more, the superficial information available from a dating website or smartphone application becomes less important than their characters.

Despite being a platform designed to be less centered on physical appearance, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder stated in 2009 that the male OkCupid users who were rated most physically attractive by female OkCupid users received 11 times as many messages as the lowest-rated male users did, the medium-rated male users received about four times as many messages, and the one-third of female users who were rated most physically attractive by the male users received about two-thirds of all messages sent by male users. According to a former company product manager, the majority of female Bumble users typically set a floor height of six feet for male users which limits their matching opportunities to only 15% of the male population.

Niche dating sites

Sites with specific demographics have become popular as a way to narrow the pool of potential matches. Successful niche sites pair people by race, sexual orientation or religion. In March 2008, the top 5 overall sites held 7% less market share than they did one year ago while the top sites from the top five major niche dating categories made considerable gains. Niche sites cater to people with special interests, such as sports fans, racing and automotive fans, medical or other professionals, people with political or religious preferences, people with medical conditions, or those living in rural farm communities.

Some dating services have been created specifically for those living with HIV and other venereal diseases in an effort to eliminate the need to lie about one's health in order to find a partner. Public health officials in Rhode Island and Utah claimed in 2015 that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for uptick of such conditions.

Some sites, referred to as adult dating sites, match individuals seeking short-term sexual encounters.

Economic trends

Although some sites offer free trials and/or profiles, most memberships can cost upwards of $60 per month. In 2008, online dating services in the United States generated $957 million in revenue.

Most free dating websites depend on advertising revenue, using tools such as Google AdSense and affiliate marketing. Since advertising revenues are modest compared to membership fees, this model requires numerous page views to achieve profitability. However, Sam Yagan describes dating sites as ideal advertising platforms because of the wealth of demographic data made available by users.

In November 2023, the stock prices of Match Group and Bumble were down 31% and 35% on the year respectively, continuing a more than two-year decline since the latter's initial public offering in February 2021 and after posting declines more than double that of the S&P 500 during the 2022 stock market decline. In addition to price increases, slowing paid user growth, and flattening app download rates following the end of the COVID-19 lockdowns, assessments among financial analyst

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