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.

Some sites place an emphasis on how much money you make and some don’t.  Check out this article talking about it.  They bring up a good point – if you take the relationship to that seriously dating and beyond level, will financial insecurity or varying spending habits cause fights?

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.

Online Dating Investors are Very Happy

There are a few different ideas why, and I have some ideas of my own:

1. From an article in the Detroit News…”People want to be with someone when times are tough,” says Brian Barcaro, founder of CatholicMatch.com.

2. It’s far cheaper to date online (especially for girls ) than it is going out all the time and trying to find someone.  If you’re on Match.com, you’re paying around $30 per month.  But if you’re going out on the town with friends to look for someone, it’s going to cost at least $30 every night.  Plus, some say it’s less expensive to be with someone than to be single – which I don’t agree with at all, but hey, the theory is out there.

3. Online Dating is still (gradually) becoming acceptable.  I know when I first started, I was very hesitant to tell my friends that I met a guy online.  For some reason I felt like it was taboo.  Now, everyone meets online.  Remeber that stat I showed you before where the average online dater is 42?  Yeah, that means people who are 50 and older are dating just as much as 20 year-olds.

Any other reasons I’m missing for online dating’s growth?

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.

Thanks!

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?