I saw this site recently and had to write about it.  Amish-Online-Dating.com.  Really?!?  I know the Amish need to date just like everyone else, but isn’t part of being Amish mean that you’re cut off from the rest of the world, and especially electronics??

LOL, maybe things have changed when I went with my parents to visit Amish country.

A lot of people think that OKCupid is a site for the “BiPolyPaganGothGamerGeek” crowd, and that therefore the stats are skewed.  I think those words mean Bisexual, PolyAmorous, Pagan, Gothic, WoW Nerds, and Kids-who-were-stuffed-in-lockers

I disagree with that.  The stats should hold true no matter what you’re interests are, whether that’s on Match, ChristianSingles, or OkCupid.  The particular phrases in the interests might differ – maybe Match users won’t have as high of a response rate for a word like “tattoos” or “zombies”, but the bottom line of the article stays true.   Make sure you find something from the other user’s profile that interests you, and mention it in the contact email.

Can She See Your Online Dating Future?

So far I can’t tell if this is really just for fun or if people are going to take this seriously.

Gelato: Signing Up from Steve Odom on Vimeo.

I’m not sure what to make of this.  It goes way beyond the Thread post I talked about.  Is it too easy?  Too 1984?  Let me know your thoughts.

They looked at over 500,000 (?!?!) first contacts on their site and figured out what to say and what not to say in an initial contact email.

How Long Did it Take to go Through 500,000 Emails?

First of all, the average reply rate was 32%, meaning about a third of the initial contact emails get a response – not too bad.  By the way, the average man-to-woman reply rate was 27%.  So the interesting part of the article is what was said in the emails to deviate from that average response rate.

Some highlights…

• If the word “atheist” was mentioned, the response rate was 43%.  And if “god” was mentioned, the response rate was 30%.
• If you mention connecting outside of the site, there’s a HUGE dropoff in the response rate.  They ranged from 10-18% when mentioning “gmail”, “chat”, “aim”, “yahoo”, “msn”, and “email”.
• Greetings other than “hi” or “hello” did very well – “how’s it going” has a response rate of 53% (wow!), “what’s up” 42%, and “hi” only 24%.
• This is my favorite.  Using slang absolutely destroys your chances of ever connecting.  If the pseudo-word “ur” is in a post, the response rate is a miniscule 7%.

What do you think of the article?  Any surprises?  Does it matter that OkCupid is a free site?  Do you think there would be any differences with Match?

He’s absolutely right in that not everyone is on a dating site, but certainly almost everyone is on facebook. What I like about this service is that you already have a reference, and one of your “friends” already knows that person. But what I don’t like is that it really limits you to the people that are pretty much within your social network already. Everyone I met online dating, there’s no way I would have met them through Thread.

What do you think?

• The average online dater is 42 years old.
• Match.com remains tops, with 3.4 million uniques/month, but people increasingly drift away from these big-box dating sites and into more niche fare: j-date, veggiedate, Christian singles. (AdAge blogger Kelly Eidson seized this opportunity to send me a link to STD Match, a dating site targeted to people living with sexually transmitted diseases. There are also — as if you didn’t know — ethnicity-specific sites.)If the world wasn’t our oyster before, the marvelous advances of the internet, coupled with mankind’s enterprising creative spirit, have ensured it certainly is now. There’s a match worth blogging.
• Average time spent on an online dating site is 15 minutes; during that period users view around 5-7 profiles.

The one that was surprising to me is that the average age of the online dater is 42.  I know there are a bunch of divorcees out there what are online dating, but I had no idea that those numbers would outweigh the online daters in their 20’s.  Does this mean then that for every 25-year-old who is dating online, there’s just as many 59 year-olds?