Social trends and public opinions A 2005 study found that online daters may have more liberal social attitudes compared to the general population in the United States.
Race and online dating A 2009 study found that African Americans were the least desired demographic in online dating; and were the least interested in forming interracial relationships with non-Black Americans. In 2008, a study investigated racial preferences using a sample of 6,070 profiles on
Yahoo! Personals. Just 29% of white men excluded women of color, compared to the 64% of white women who excluded men of color. Follow-up studies conducted by these authors in 2009 and 2011 found similar patterns: white women were less open to interracial relationships than white men. In 2018, a study analyzed the activity of approximately 200,000 users of an online dating app in the
United States. The authors found that White men and Asian women were the most desired. The authors found that
White men were preferred by
women of color, while men of color generally preferred women of color. White men were accepting of
Asian and
Hispanic women, yet White women tended to exclude non-White men. These authors also disputed some common notions about racial bias in online dating. Licensed psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser told
MarketWatch men typically prefer younger women because "they are more easy to impress; they are more (moldable) in terms of everything from emotional behavior to what type of restaurant to eat at," and because they tend to be "more fit, have less expectations and less baggage." On the other hand, women look for (financial) stability and education, attributes that come with age, said Kaiser. In terms of educational attainment, men's desirability generally increases the more educated they are, but for women the effect of education on their desirability is more mixed. Ong (2016) found that women's interest in men's profiles increased with the profile's education level whereas men's interest in women's was unaffected. According to Whyte and Torgler (2017), women are more likely to contact a potential mate with higher educational levels relative to their own, but increased age lessens their disfavor towards the less educated in the dating market, which is the opposite for men for whom it matters more the older they get. Bruch and Newman (2017) observed that men's desirability increased the more educated they were, but women's desirability only increased up to a bachelor's degree and decreased after that. Neyt et al. (2019) observed that women preferred higher-educated men, having two times higher odds of liking men's profiles if they had the highest education level, but men had no such favor towards higher-educated, although they disfavored lesser-educated women's profiles. In a study by Egebark et al. (2021), high-educated men preferred low-educated over high-educated dating profiles as much as high-educated women preferred high-educated over low-educated profiles. In 2016, Gareth Tyson of the
Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues published a paper analyzing the behavior of
Tinder users in
New York City and
London. In order to minimize the number of variables, they created profiles of white heterosexual people only. For each sex, there were three accounts using stock photographs, two with actual photographs of volunteers, one with no photos whatsoever, and one that was apparently deactivated. The researchers pointedly only used pictures of people of average physical attractiveness. Tyson and his team wrote an algorithm that collected the biographical information of all the matches, liked them all, then counted the number of returning likes. They found that men and women employed drastically different mating strategies. Men liked a large proportion of the profiles they viewed, but received returning likes only 0.6% of the time; women were much more selective but received matches 10% of the time. Men received matches at a much slower rate than women. Once they received a match, women were far more likely than men to send a message, 21% compared to 7%, but they took more time before doing so. Tyson and his team found that for the first two-thirds of messages from each sex, women sent them within 18 minutes of receiving a match compared to five minutes for men. Men's first messages had an average of a dozen characters, and were typical simple greetings; by contrast, initial messages by women averaged 122 characters. In fact, over 80% of the first messages in the data set obtained for the purposes of the study were from men, and women were highly selective in choosing whom to respond to, a rate of less than 20%. Therefore, studying women's replies yielded much insight into their preferences. Nevertheless, although the probability of a response is low, it is well above zero, and if the other person does respond, it can be a self-esteem booster, said Kaiser. In general, people in their 20s employ the "self-service dating service" while women in their late 20s and up tend to use the matchmaking service. This is because of the social pressure in China on "leftover women" (
Sheng nu), meaning those in their late 20s but still not married. Women who prefer not to ask potentially embarrassing questions – such as whether both spouses will handle household finances, whether or not they will live with his parents, or how many children he wants to have, if any – will get a matchmaker to do it for them. Both sexes prefer matchmakers who are women. (This is approximately the reciprocal of
Euler's number, e = \lim_{x \rightarrow 0} (1 + x)^{1/x} \approx 2.718281828. See
derivation of the optimal policy.) However, making online contact is only the first step, and indeed, most conversations failed to birth a relationship. As two potential partners interact more and more, the superficial information available from a dating website or smartphone application becomes less important than their characters.
OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder stated in 2009 that the male OkCupid users who were rated most physically attractive by female OkCupid users received 11 times as many messages as the lowest-rated male users did, the medium-rated male users received about four times as many messages, and the one-third of female users who were rated most physically attractive by the male users received about two-thirds of all messages sent by male users. According to a former company product manager, the majority of female
Bumble users typically set a floor height of six feet for male users which limits their matching opportunities to only 15% of the male population.
Niche dating sites Sites with specific demographics have become popular as a way to narrow the pool of potential matches. Successful niche sites pair people by race, sexual orientation or religion. In March 2008, the top 5 overall sites held 7% less market share than they did one year ago while the top sites from the top five major niche dating categories made considerable gains. Niche sites cater to people with special interests, such as sports fans, racing and automotive fans, medical or other professionals, people with political or religious preferences, people with medical conditions, or those living in rural farm communities. Some dating services have been created specifically for those living with
HIV and other
venereal diseases in an effort to eliminate the need to lie about one's health in order to find a partner. Public health officials in
Rhode Island and
Utah claimed in 2015 that Tinder and similar apps were responsible for uptick of such conditions. Some sites, referred to as
adult dating sites, match individuals seeking short-term sexual encounters.
Economic trends Although some sites offer free trials and/or profiles, most memberships can cost upwards of $60 per month. In 2008, online dating services in the United States generated $957 million in revenue. Most free dating websites depend on
advertising revenue, using tools such as
Google AdSense and
affiliate marketing. Since advertising revenues are modest compared to membership fees, this model requires numerous
page views to achieve profitability. However,
Sam Yagan describes dating sites as ideal advertising platforms because of the wealth of demographic data made available by users. In November 2023, the stock prices of
Match Group and Bumble were down 31% and 35% on the year respectively, continuing a more than two-year decline since the latter's
initial public offering in February 2021 and after posting declines more than double that of the
S&P 500 during the
2022 stock market decline. In addition to price increases, slowing paid user growth, and flattening app download rates following the end of the
COVID-19 lockdowns, assessments among
financial analysts of an
oversaturated market, concerns about low consumer satisfaction with the services, and growing skepticism about dating app features and algorithms contributed to the declines. Match Group and Bumble shares continued to fall during the first quarter of 2024 while the S&P 500 rose, and the number of paid users for Match Group fell by 6% during the first quarter of 2024 while Bumble's paid users grew by 18% in comparison to a 3% decline and a 31% increase for each company respectively during the first quarter of 2023.
Matching and divorce rates In 2012, social psychologists
Benjamin Karney,
Harry Reis, and others published an analysis of online dating in
Psychological Science in the Public Interest that concluded that the matching algorithms of online dating services are only negligibly better at matching people than if they were matched at random. In 2014, Kang Zhao at the
University of Iowa constructed a new approach based on the algorithms used by Amazon and Netflix, based on recommendations rather than the autobiographical notes of match seekers. Users' activities reflect their tastes and attractiveness, or the lack thereof, they reasoned. This algorithm increases the chances of a response by 40%, the researchers found. E-commerce firms also employ this "
collaborative filtering" technique. Nevertheless, it is still not known what the algorithm for finding the perfect match would be. However, while collaborative filtering and
recommender systems have been demonstrated to be more effective than matching systems based on similarity and complementarity, they have also been demonstrated to be highly skewed to the preferences of early users and against racial minorities such as
African Americans and
Hispanic Americans which led to the rise of niche dating sites for those groups. In 2014, the
Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division criticized
eHarmony's claims of creating a greater number of marriages and more durable and satisfying marriages than alternative dating websites, and in 2018, the
Advertising Standards Authority banned eHarmony advertisements in the
United Kingdom after the
company was unable to provide any evidence to verify its marketing claims that its website's matching algorithm was scientifically proven to give its users a greater chance of finding long-term intimate relationships. Data released by Tinder in 2018 showed that of the 1.6 billion swipes it recorded per day, only 26 million result in matches (a match rate of approximately only 1.63%), despite users logging into the app on average 11 times per day, with male user sessions averaging 7.2 minutes and female user sessions averaging 8.5 minutes (or 79.2 minutes and 93.5 minutes per day respectively). Noting the research of Karney, Reis, and their co-authors comparing online to offline dating and the research of
communications studies scholar
Nicole Ellison and her co-authors comparing online dating to comparative shopping, The December 2018
Atlantic article noted that the percentage of U.S. adults living without spouses or
partners rose to 42 percent by 2017 and to 61 percent among adults under the age of 35. Social psychologist
David Buss has estimated that approximately 30 percent of the men on Tinder are married. Buss has argued further "Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there. One dimension of this is the impact it has on men's psychology. When there is ... a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating," and there is a feeling of disconnect when choosing future partners. In addition, the cognitive process identified by psychologist
Barry Schwartz as the "
paradox of choice" (also referred to as "
choice overload" or "
fear of a better option") was cited in an article published in
The Atlantic that suggested that the appearance of an abundance of potential partners causes online daters to be less likely to choose a partner and be less satisfied with their choices of partners. The study found that increases in "
market size" (the number of platform users of the opposite sex) deterred participation and caused users of the opposite sex to become more selective, while increases in "
competition size" (the number of platform users of the same sex) caused users to become less selective. The study noted that while focal users could send a message after reading the long profiles of candidate users (with the complete list of attributes), the study found that focal users were more likely to receive a match after reading short profiles because the long profiles presented greater preference mismatches to the focal users that led them to send messages to candidate users with fewer mismatches but who were less likely to accept their proposed match. subsequent research published in the
Review of Economics of the Household in June 2020 did find a correlation between increased access to
broadband internet or
mobile phones and higher divorce rates in
rural counties and lower divorces rates in
metropolitan areas in the United States. In June 2013,
PNAS USA published a representative survey of 19,131 U.S. adults married between 2005 and 2012 that found that marriages that began online were slightly less likely to result in separation or divorce in comparison to marriages formed offline and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction. In July 2014,
Computers in Human Behavior published a study that found that after controlling for various economic, demographic, and psychological variables that state-by-state differences in the United States in
Facebook and other
social networking service (SNS) user account rates was correlated with higher divorce rates and diminished marriage quality. In October 2015,
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking published a study of 371 undergraduate students at a university in the
Midwestern United States that found that
Facebook friend lists increased physical and emotional infidelities among couples, lowered relationship commitment, and diminished relationship quality due to
psychological priming effects. In November 2016, the
Journal of International Social Issues published a study that found that U.S. states with a higher
Google Trends search volume index for
Match.com in 2013 had fewer marriages in 2014, while U.S. states with higher search volume indices for
Hinge, Bumble,
Plenty of Fish, and Facebook in 2013 had a greater number of divorces in 2014. In February 2019,
Technological Forecasting and Social Change published a study examining associations between broadband internet access and divorce in
China using
provincial data from 2002 to 2014 that found that for every 1% increase in the number of broadband subscribers the number of divorces grew by 0.008%. In December 2020,
PLOS One published a study on online dating in
Switzerland that found that couples formed through online dating had stronger cohabiting intentions than those formed offline and no differences in relationship satisfaction. In January 2024,
Computers in Human Behavior published a survey of 923 married U.S. adults where roughly half of the subjects met their spouses online that found evidence for an "online dating effect" where online daters reported less satisfying and durable marriages, but the researchers suggested that the differences could be explained by
societal marginalization and geographic distance.
Online matchmaking services In 2008, a variation of the online dating model emerged in the form of introduction sites, where members have to search and contact other members, who introduce them to other members whom they deem compatible. Introduction sites differ from the traditional online dating model, and attracted many users and significant investor interest. In China, the number of separations per a thousand couples doubled, from 1.46 in 2006 to about three in 2016, while the number of actual divorces continues to rise, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Demand for online dating services among divorcees keeps growing, especially in the large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In addition, more and more people are expected to use online dating and matchmaking services as China continues to urbanize in the late 2010s and 2020s. == Reception ==