Apr 17 2008
The Boston Bachelor’s Online Dating Challenge: Part I, The Experiment
By THEBOSTONBACHELOR.COM / April 17, 2008
For most guys, online dating is a fucking waste of time. Actually, according to Jupiter Research, online dating is a really big fucking waste of time, as 97% of guys cancel their online dating membership within 3 months due to dissatisfaction. The number one reason cited in this survey?
Lack of response.
In fact, the NY Times bestselling book Freakonomics states that 57% of men who sign up for online dating go through their membership without getting a single response from a gal. Instead, in today’s online dating world, most guys experience the following:
1. Guy puts up typical online dating profile and shells out $60 for a 3 month membership.
2. Guy browses for profiles.
3. Guy emails 100 girls over the next few months.
4. Guy gets 5 responses back from the 100 initial emails he sent. 3 of them read “Sorry, but I don’t think we’re compatible. Good luck!” The remaining 2 seem promising, so he emails them asking for their phone numbers. One offers her screen name instead, and he never hears back from the other.
5. Guy chats on-and-off with the girl over AOL IM or MSN or GTalk. He tries to get a face-to-face meeting with her, but it never materializes. Guy increases porn-viewing habits.
6. Guy cancels online dating membership, and puts a picture of Dr. Phil’s face on his dartboard.
Sadly the above scenario is really not much of an exaggeration. So why is online dating so fucked? Well, for starters…
• It’s a huge numbers game. If you’re a guy and you don’t believe me, do what I did and set up a personals profile as a slightly attractive woman on CraigsList. I guarantee that you’ll get at least 50 email responses within the first few hours. By the second day you’ll have at least 100-150 replies.
• You’re probably writing the same shit as all the other guys write, or copying and pasting from a template (yes, she’ll be able to tell; no, I don’t blame you for doing it). Again, set up a fake profile as a girl and you’ll see what I mean.
• Writing individually tailored emails takes up a lot of time, time that could be better spent on more productive activities (like shaving the back of your neck).
• There’s a lot of crazy people out there. PS: If a woman has the acronym TV in “her” tagline, that doesn’t mean that “she” likes to watch television.
• Pictures lie.
• Many of these online dating sites have no qualms about making their employees pose as lonely, nubile 19 year-olds to keep you on the site.
• You’ll get more rebounds than Dwight Howard in a charity basketball game. Seriously, at least half the women on the site just got out of a long term relationship.
• They drop like flies. If they’ve been on the site for more than a week, chances are they’ve already received more emails than they can check.
Yeah, you get the point.
But 2 weeks ago, I received an email from the folks over at Yahoo! Personals, offering me a free 3 month trial membership. So I thought to myself, why not take them up on their offer and make a little experiment out of it: Is it really possible for the average guy to just put up a profile, sit back, and have women (who aren’t actually guys in Bombay selling penis pills) emailing him constantly?
So here’s the challenge:
1. For the next 10 weeks, I’m going to rotate a new profile and profile tagline. For starters, I’m just going to use a plain-vanilla profile and tagline, one you’d typically see in the average guy’s profile.
2. I’m going to count both the number of views and the number of responses I get (positive, neutral, negative).
3. This is where I need your help. 8 of the 10 profiles and taglines will be coming from the readers here. The profiles can say anything, provided that they’re approved by the dating site and they don’t contain any kind of hate language or personal threats. Otherwise, use your imagination and come up with something creative. Email me your original profile and tagline at bb@thebostonbachelor.com. Do not post it in the comments section here, for obvious reasons.
4. At the end of the trial period, the results and responses will be tallied. The person who wrote the profile that received the most number of positive and neutral email responses from women will get a surprise gift. Of course, if you don’t want the gift, I’ll just keep it for myself.
I’ll be back in a few weeks with an update. Have fun; I know I will.
-The Boston Bachelor
Floor.
Kid. Have you read Freakonomics? It’s been in the queue ever since it was published.
Online dating sights must make a shit load of money. Reminds me of our discussion on what categories of product guys will throw any amount of money at to solve: Hair loss, beating the stock market, dating etc…
In the name of science,
~Bill Nye
Check your email for the link. Consider it a partial replacement for the defective birthday gift.
I think hair loss is by far the biggest cash cow generated off of male insecurity. The ridiculous thing is hair loss doesn’t even matter. Chalk another one up for the marketing industry.
I think the female equivalent for hair loss is weight loss (talk about another cash cow), except weight loss can actually make a huge difference for a woman in terms of attractiveness. NAHS reunion there of.
I don’t get why people overcomplicate the science of weight loss–everyone I’ve known who’s lost 40 or lb. over the course of a few months has done the same exact thing: eat less calories and carbs, and exercise more. Shit, maybe I should start my own dieting company: “The RL Atkins South Beach Slim Fast Nutrasystem Smarties Diet.”
I’m a single female and have done the online dating thing more times than I can count. I agree that women typically get lots of emails; however, we still browse through the profiles of single men and contact them through the site. At least I do. Well, I did. I gave up on such sites after I got dumped by the last boyfriend more than a year ago. Now I just wait for my Prince Charming to stumble upon my blog.
Good luck with your little experiment! Can’t wait to see how it turns out!
im definitely planning to check back to see how this goes for you. good luck! (though maybe i’d rather it not go well, as it’d surely make for a more interesting story?? haha).
I can’t wait to see how this goes. Funny, I always thought dating sites were meat markets for men and that they only came on looking for sex. I do think you’re right. Being a woman I can see right through that mess. I can’t help wondering if dating sites for men are what you put into it. I mean come on. If you’re sending cut and paste first contacts how much effort is that?
One of the biggest problems I see is that more often than not men go after the most beautiful women on the site or the ones with her boobs out, etc. Of course she’s overwhelmed with emails. You gotta send her something that stands out and it won’t be a cut and paste something that sounds just like every other guy.
Try this while you’re doing this experiment - be wildly different. I’ve even heard that sometimes the straight forward, bad boy image will get you everywhere. Now that’s an experiment. I was on one message board where there more obnoxious the man was about women the more the women contacted him. Go figure!
I’m trying to hit all ends of the spectrum, from sensitive new age guy to straightforward joe to rico suave to just-escaped-from-the-insane-asylum. Unfortunately, certain language filters have prohibited me from using all my profiles. Results so far have been intriguing.
Looking forward to the final results, meanwhile this article regarding a similar experiment done at match.com is interesting.
http://www.myprops.org/content/Online-dating-Results-using-fake-profiles-on-Match.com/