Day: July 28, 2011

Absolutely not.

If you include ONLY physical characteristics as a measure, and create some form of consistent baseline for attractiveness, then I'd be surprised if there was any significant impact on online dating site use on attractiveness. 

The same kind of financial circumstances that prevent a lot of people from getting online at all (and thus using an online dating site) are the same circumstances that reduce preventive healthcare, wardrobe budget, and other personal care that typically enhances looks (spa treatments, hairstyling, teeth whitening and hair removal).

That said, what people think of as attractive in a potential mate usually embodies more than the physical – a sunny or even devilish personality, confidence and poise, extroversion and a welcoming/inviting nature. 

Not everyone can easily pull this type of attraction off in person, and online it can be even more difficult to fully convey these qualities even if they exist in abundance "offline".

I think the fairest thing to say is that it's very difficult to "be your most attractive" online – though breaking the ice and reducing tensions/expectations via an online dating service CAN increase attraction/comfort during subsequent in-person meetings.

Are people using online dating sites less attractive than average?

No, such sites do not currently exist (or are still in "stealth mode").

That said, the idea of transmitting smells via the Internet is nothing new – in fact, DigiScents was a startup created 10 years ago to develop the "iSmell", a hardware device that could reproduce smells based on a data file transmitted via email, or embedded in a website.

It's entirely possible that one could license the iSmell IP, and embed similar data into dating profiles. Of course, the original iSmell was an output-only device – which means a second device (iSniff?) would be required to identify and codify the unique smell(s) of each site member.

Read more on this rather unusual startup, as well as a few other historical attempts at transmitting smells electronically here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell

Are there examples of online dating sites where you can use your sense of smell (or body chemistry) to attract a date before meeting the person in real life?

Whether it's movies, gambling, oil, health supplements, or online dating, the way to judge maturity is the same – when the Feds decide to regulate it in some fashion. 

While the shady players or bad business practices may never go away, at some point Uncle Sam decides that Halliburton needs to at least pretend to care about the safety of its pipelines, or that compulsive gamblers probably shouldn't be kneecapped behind the Stardust when they lose big. 

Put another way, once you get big enough, taking obvious legal risks for financial gain makes less business sense than providing smooth reliable quarterly results for your investors. 

Other than general Internet and ecommerce rulings, we haven't really seen the federal government go after online dating claims/methodologies/terms of service specifically. There has been a fair bit of private litigation against individual sites for discrimination against gays/lesbians, and there is a general lack of "accessibility" for transgender users outside the adult personals… but for now, dating remains basically on an even regulatory playing field with any other type of online business. 

Which, to me, says that it has room left to grow.

Is the online dating business past its prime?

There is no simple way to search for the same (real) user across multiple dating sites.

The idea that you would want to do this to verify consistency in the user's self-description seems to be working too hard to get an answer that doesn't help you out very much. The basic outcomes of such a search would be the following:

1) User is consistent across profiles, all of which can be found – but may still be lying about their height, marital status, etc. Consistently dishonest is still consistent.

2) User is consistent across findable profiles, but actually has several variant profiles that remain undetected (for example, profiles that change the user's gender, and/or use a significant quantity of falsified data)

3) User is inconsistent across profiles, but for "innocent" reasons – no longer active on a certain site, and profile information has changed since they last logged in (used to be married, now divorced; used to be 100K+ salary, now unemployed). The user themselves may not be aware that their profiles are not up to date – given the time required to craft a profile when joining a site, many users do not regularly update their own profile unless they experience a dramatic change in messages/replies to their messages.

4) User is intentionally inconsistent across profiles, for "targeting" reasons. Many people do not like to read or respond to profiles that are too general, or too accepting of other types of users (the woman willing to date men 18-80, the man willing to date women any distance away). By creating different profiles to target different groups they might be interested in, the user may experience improved results, and meet more compatible people… For example, a bisexual person who lists twice as gay and straight – and would be happy and monogamous in either type of relationship.

The question also implies that once your friend "likes" a profile on a dating site, they start placing expectations/hopes on that person being "the one" before meeting. This is not only dangerous, but highly unlikely to work out statistically. By placing too much energy in a single pairing, your friend risks being disappointed and having to start over – and perhaps eventually burning out on online dating entirely.

The alternative, and the path I would strongly advise, is instead to simply conduct an ongoing search, and not place all your eggs in a single basket. By either actively dating multiple people at once, or at least continuing to make contact with new potentials, your friend can better reduce the risks/pain of meeting a poor match, or having a good online connection simply sputter out after meeting.

Is there a search engine or program available to check multiple dating sites for the same user?

The industry as a whole is very "numbers phobic", in large part due to the potential issues they'd have in accurately marketing the small number of local matches typically exist among the active membership.

Case in point: pre-acquisition (by just a few days, really), OKCupid put out this scathing article about how useless it is to pay for a dating site, and drills down heavily into the numbers:

http://static.izs.me/why-you-sho…

Why does my link not actually go to OKCupid? Well, Match.com bought them, and <poof>, the article disappeared!

Hrm!

Anyway, Long story short, I'd say your friend is right in terms of "active traffic" being in favor of Craigslist… After all, only 5% or less of match.com and eHarmony's respective members are likely active! That said, there's no way to tell how many of the posts on craigslist are real to begin with (the tales of scam/spam/cam ads are never-ending), as well as no way to judge things like number of CL marriages, etc. Oh yeah, and Craig also sells used dishwashers and rents apartments, among many many other things, so there's also no good way to separate out the dating traffic.

Perhaps it's easier to say that, assuming all active dating traffic on all dating sites was real, including craigslist, that the latter site would be far ahead of any of the pay sites in terms of worldwide ad postings.

Still, I've blatantly ignored the other majors, like free site plentyoffish.com, which is reputed to have a pretty large active membership, as well as sites like Zoosk and Tagged with fairly high "buzz" factor (well, at least, last year).

With no one releasing solid verifiable figures on their performance, it's just not really possible to say whether you or your friend are correct. Rather, it's best to say that there really are no actual "dating" sites – all the sites mentioned are simply compatibility matching engines, none of whom track or report statistics on actual dates that happen in the real world. Kinda sad, huh?

What is the biggest dating site in America?