With about 9% of American adults turning to online dating sites to find love, and now 33% of marriages involved some form of online dating. With these numbers, it is no surprise that data is playing a significant role in this industry. You walk into a bar now and sit down, and instead of people looking around and trying to meet people around them, they pull out their phone and open Tinder. It blows my mind that dating sites ever existed before data analytics.
Data can be collected many different ways. The most common way is by having the users of the site fill out questions to help explain who they are as a person, like interests, dislikes, passions and other important and helpful information. This sounds simple and easy right? WRONG. Some of these dating sites can have 400 plus questions to answer touching on a wide variety of topics from favorite music to political views. That is a lot of questions, but dating agencies said that they need all this information because the more data they have, the more successful they can be in finding your soulmate. Online dating business generates more than $2 billion dollars a year, so using the data collected correctly is very important to the future and reputation of the dating agencies.
The questionnaire definitely helps to collect data, but I think you can guess the biggest problem that dating agencies run into. If you guess that the issue is that people are liars on dating sites, you’re correct. We have all heard those nightmare online dating stories where they looked one way in their picture but totally different in person, or they say they are one age but are actually older. People lie, which is dumb because those people are on there usually to find love, which means people are eventually going to meet you. Studies have shown that people tend to lie most about their physical appearance, weight, height, age and even their income. When people lie it obviously is generating inaccurate data. Dating agencies are well aware of this flaw in the way people present themselves and try to get around it. They try to grab data from other sites such as Netflix, Facebook and online shopping sites because this data tends to be more accurate. They also watch the users behaviors while on the dating site and what profiles they view in order to get a better idea about what/ who the user is interested in.
Match.com is using facial recognition technology to determine user’s “type”. The company says that even if people do not have a preference for height, hair color, race, or eye color. The company says by analysing the faces of users exes, they can figure out the person’s type and match them up with people they are more likely to have a physical attraction to. Match.com hopes to master this so that they can have something to separate them from competitors. It’s like they are finding literally everything you want in a person just by asking a bunch of questions and stalking your exes. This service is not cheap but it is worth the investment if it means matching people with not only the same interests, but have some type of physical attraction to each other.
Online dating websites still have a long way to go in terms of data. They need to fine tune their algorithms to make better matches. They also need to find different ways to collect data while filtering out the information that is not accurate. Just like every other industries, they also have to make sure that there is secure privacy and people are not able to hack in and gather people’s personal information.
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