OPW, IRENA BROOKS - Jan 30 - I just came across an article in TechnologyReview which was surprising only in its complete lack of surprising insight!
PengXia at the University of Massachusetts published results of a behavior analysis of 200K people on Baihe.com, one of China's top matchmaking/dating sites. "Their conclusions are fascinating," states TechnologyReview.com. Here are the "fascinating" stats from the report:
- Males tend to look for younger females and females look at the socioeconomic status of potential partners.
- Men send far more messages but get fewer replies than women. Women are more likely to receive unsolicited messages and less likely to reply.
- A fairly large fraction of messages are sent to users whose attributes do not match the sender’s stated preferences.
We were disappointed with this report. But its an example of how tough it can be to pull really meaningful and interesting data from surveys. Our hats off to OKTrends. They did such a great job in the past. But noone's picked up their baton and run with it. We're sitting on so much useful data that could result in potentially landmark insight.
A lot of dating sites such as POF, OKCupid and Match.com have been using behavior matchmaking algorithms since 2011. So what's the results? Where's the insight?
