The
Internet is a great place to pretend to be someone you're not.
That's why popular online dating site
OKCupid looked at statistics and its user base to discover the
biggest lies we tell to potential mates.
Nerds. As we all know, the Internet is a great place to pretend
to be someone you're not. For instance, here's me in Second Life
having a great time:
Anyhow, in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is
totally harmless. Like, who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is
taller than you are in real life? Or if flickr thinks you're single
when you're really married? But in online dating, where the whole
goal is to eventually meet other people in person,
creating a false impression is a whole different deal.
People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make
themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely
are. But it's very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from
fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we're able to shed
some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind
them.
Let's get started.
"I'm 6 feet tall."
REALITY: People are two inches shorter in real life.
This whole post was inspired by an amusing graph we stumbled
across while trying to answer the question Do taller guys have
more sex? The answer, to a degree, is yes, and I'll expand on
that in a little bit. But in this case what was more interesting
than the sex was the (supposed) tallness of the guys.
The male heights on OkCupid very nearly follow the expected
normal distribution-except the whole thing is shifted to the right
of where it should be. You can see it better when we overlay the
implied best fit below (pardon the technical language):
Almost universally guys like to add a couple inches. You can
also see a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8",
the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This
means that guys as they get closer to six feet round up a
bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological
benchmark.
When we looked into the data for women, we were surprised to see
height exaggeration was just as widespread, though without the
lurch towards a benchmark height:
On a somewhat humbling personal note, I just went back and
looked at my own profile, and apparently I list myself at 5' 11".
Really, I'm a touch under 5' 10". Hmmm.
. . .
As for whether it even makes sense for people to make such an
obvious and easily disproved exaggeration, the jury is out. We've
found that taller people, up to a point, have more sex:
But as far as messages go, shorter women actually seem
to get more attention:
These are the average weekly unsolicited message totals by
height; you can think of these as the number of times a person is
"hit on" out of the blue each week on OkCupid. a 5' 4" woman gets
60 more contacts each year than a six-footerThe genders are plotted
on different scales because of the eternal fact that men almost
always make the first move, so women get many more unsolicited
messages.
It's plain from these two charts that women six feet or taller
are either less attractive to men or are considered too
intimidating to message. The data also raises the interesting
possibility that these tall women are much more likely to sleep
with a man who does approach them. Compare the 6' 0" woman
to her 5' 4" counterpart: the taller woman gets hit on about
two-thirds as much, yet has had slightly more sex
partners.
"I make $100,000 a year."
REALITY: People are 20% poorer than they say they are.
Apparently, an online dater's imagination is the best performing
mutual fund of the last 10 years. Here's what people are saying on
OkCupid, versus what their incomes should be:
Note that in formulating the "expected" lines for each age we
were very careful to adjust for OkCupid's particular demographics:
we compared every individual against the average not just by age
but by zip code. Here a breakdown by gender of the exaggeration
rates:
A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a
man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.
. . .
We did a little investigating as to whether a person's stated
income had any real effect on his or her online dating experience.
Unsurprisingly, we found that it matters a lot, particularly for
men. This is a by-age messaging distribution:
These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young
guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and
don't make much money, go die in a fire. It's not hard to see where
the incentive to exaggerate comes from.
"Here's a recent pic."
REALITY: The more attractive the picture, the more likely it is
to be out-of-date.
The above picture, for example, was over two years old when it
was uploaded. How do we know? Most modern cameras append text tags
to the the jpgs they take. These tags, called EXIF
metadata, specify things like the exposure and f-stop
settings, gps information if your camera has it, and, of course,
the time and date the photo was taken. This is how programs like
iPhoto know when (and sometimes where) you've taken your
pictures.
Analyzing this stuff, we found that most of the pictures on
OkCupid were of recent vintage; site-wide the median photo age at
upload was just 92 days. However, hotter photos were much more
likely to be outdated than normal ones. Here's a comparison (the
age of a picture below is how old it was when it was
uploaded to our site):
As you can see, over a third of the hottest photos on the site
are a year old or more. And more than twice as many hot photos are
over three years old (12%) as average-looking ones (5%), which
makes sense because people are more inclined to cling to the pics
that make them look their best
Another useful (if somewhat unorthodox) way to take in this
graph is to follow the horizontal gridlines. If you trace out from
"20%", for example, you can see that 1 in 5 average-looking photos
is at least a year old, meanwhile, among the hot photos, nearly 1
in 5 is at least two years old.
It also turns out that older people also upload older
photos:
The upshot here is, if you see a good-looking picture of a man
over 30, that photo is very likely to be out-of-date. Not to get
personal again, but my own OkCupid photo shows a Burberry-dressed
27 year-old, strumming away on his guitar. Meanwhile, I turn 35 in
a couple months and am writing this post in the same shorts and
tee-shirt I've been wearing for a week. Time waits for no man,
unless that man doesn't update his personal information.
"I'm bisexual."
REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in
one gender.
OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it's not our
intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity. But
when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very
surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as
bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not
both as you might expect. Site-wide, here's how it breaks out:
This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay
people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually
adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these
trends in action in the chart below.
Again, this is just the data we've collected. We'd be very
interested in our bisexual users' thoughts on this
single-sex-messaging phenomenon, so if you'd like to weigh-in
please use the comments section. Please note, everybody, that we
don't assume that bis should be "into both genders equally." We
only assume that they should be into both genders at all.
The swaths of red and blue that you see in these sexuality charts
represent people who message only one gender. The purple areas are
people who send any messages, in whatever proportion, to
both men and women.
In this chart, throughout the teens and twenties, the male
bisexual population is mostly observably gay men. By the
mid-thirties, it seems, most of these men are more comfortable
self-identifying as gay and have left the bi population. By the end
of our chart, 3 of every 4 bi males on OkCupid are observably
straight. Meanwhile, the proportion of men who message both women
and other men holds fairly steady.
The proportions for women are more consistent over time:
12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general,
I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only
about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and
girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to
the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your
fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most
bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy
of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is
safe.
. . .
In gathering data for this last section on sexuality, we found
so much interesting stuff that we're making it the topic of our
next post. We'll look at the messaging, searching, and stalking (!)
patterns of gay, bi, and straight people and see what else we can
learn about the sexual continuum. Until then, no lie: thanks for
reading.
OkCupid's data scientists, Max Shron and Aditya Mukerjee,
contributed additional research to this post.
OKCupid is the leading
free online dating site in the US, with over 4.5 million monthly
unique visitors. Its blog, OKTrends, compiles observations from
hundreds of millions of real people's interactions on the site,
revealing an unprecedented look into human behavior.
The author of this post can be contacted at
tips@gizmodo.com
Mobile searches also lead to the ‘YouTube’ search term as many phones have ’search portals’ as a homepage instead of URL bar.
Amazing that blogger is still so big. Can’t remember the last time I visited a blogger.com blog…
Yeah – i am surprised as well given it has been labeled the Spammers’ heaven..
If it is such a knock on Yahoo for being the 4th most visited site, what is it for thenextweb for being the 1 billionth most visited site?
Well, to be honest we are at #3452 which is a lot better than being at #1000000000.
To be fair Boris, Lakawak was only 999,996,548 spots off.
Oh…and this is why blogs are a joke and why blog writers will NEVER be mistaken for serious journalists. YouTube and Yahoo have been trading spots for a LONG time now. (Several months at least.) YouTube spikes on weekends while Yahoo spikes on Mondays. So this huge news story isn’t even a news story at all.
I believe the term is “put up or shut up”. If you’re certain you’d do a better job, please drop us a line
At what point did people decide that all bloggers desperately want to be journalists?
This is expected as because of the “visual” impact
Youtube IS google. So, while I get what Alexa is reporting, I think they ought to be combined. But since the writer is biased (being the editor for the Google Blog) they will most likely seek data to support their own theory, rather than the other way around. This is yellow journalism.
So let me get this straight: Because YOU think that they should be combined, I’m the one skewing the story? Sorry, but being owned by Google does not equate to being Google.
Note how you didn’t say a word about Live.com and MSN.com being 2 separate things in the top 10 list.
YouTube is a video service, not a search provider. The closest that I’d ever get to equating the two would be if this story were about Google Video.
Biased? Honestly, yes, I probably am. Does it come into play in this story? No. In fact, I think Alexa results are so far skewed that they barely matter. I’m pretty sure I alluded to that in the post.
It’s not journalism, therefore it isn’t yellow journalism. If you want journalism, subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. But what you apparently want to do is run your mouth, so you’ve found your platform.
Pardon me while I golf clap for you.
Go get em tiger.
you are very right – this isn’t journalism in any way
enjoy your golf clap – if a golf clap happens on the web – and nobody is there to hear it – it doesn’t count
That’s like saying – for example – that the traffic for whitehouse.gov should be combined with every US government website as the administration is part of the government, and then Alexia should report the entire US government as one website. Do tell, does that make sense? Also – there is no “theory” here, Brad just stated who Alexia ranked the sites.
We really can’t deny that YouTube has become one of the most popular websites because it is one of those sites that originated in video sharing and people can join the site for free.
Wow this is truly amazing news. Who woulda thunk it.
http://www.isp-logs.es.tc
Yahoo isn’t that great. It’s good and I visit it everyday, but still, I would much rather use youtube.
Pretty interesting to see the dominance of google in searches.
pretty interesting