Now being the curious little bastard I am about the world,
my thoughts have turned recently to the world on online dating. I’ve heard all
the horror stories about fake Russian girlfriends who plead with you to send
them money and so on, but don’t worry; today we’re just focusing on things here
at home.
RSVP Dating describes itself as Australia’s #1 website for
singles, and by the look of it they seem to be telling the truth. You can
search for people by a lot of different criteria including age, whether they
smoke or not, whether they have kids or not, what sort of education they’ve
got, what they’ve put down as their ‘body type’ (slim, athletic, etc) and so
on. I spent an hour or two the other day doing just that.
My goal today was just to figure out roughly how many active
profiles there might be on RSVP dating, and whether one gender badly
outnumbered the other. The maximum number of search results that can be
displayed at one time is 600, so to get accurate figures I clicked ‘search’ for
people by age one year at a time. I kept the other criteria very broad, they
just had to have a display photograph, had to live within 100kms of me (so
anywhere in Melbourne basically) and had to have been online at some point in
the last month. These are the figures I got:
Age
|
Male
|
Female
|
18
|
40
|
34
|
19
|
38
|
35
|
20
|
88
|
59
|
21
|
91
|
66
|
22
|
133
|
92
|
23
|
165
|
128
|
24
|
260
|
190
|
25
|
287
|
222
|
26
|
330
|
299
|
27
|
372
|
346
|
28
|
405
|
393
|
29
|
419
|
423
|
30
|
429
|
428
|
31
|
395
|
419
|
32
|
406
|
419
|
33
|
396
|
401
|
34
|
383
|
418
|
35
|
363
|
372
|
36
|
362
|
391
|
37
|
281
|
334
|
38
|
304
|
326
|
39
|
299
|
293
|
40
|
262
|
283
|
41
|
257
|
257
|
42
|
252
|
262
|
43
|
214
|
230
|
44
|
202
|
199
|
45
|
179
|
160
|
46
|
175
|
186
|
47
|
147
|
168
|
48
|
160
|
163
|
49
|
127
|
145
|
50
|
128
|
160
|
51
|
94
|
130
|
52
|
108
|
155
|
53
|
103
|
89
|
54
|
91
|
115
|
55
|
65
|
104
|
56
|
65
|
92
|
57
|
73
|
78
|
58
|
59
|
75
|
59
|
58
|
74
|
60
|
58
|
74
|
61
|
43
|
44
|
62
|
51
|
50
|
63
|
35
|
42
|
64
|
26
|
40
|
65
|
24
|
23
|
66
|
17
|
32
|
67
|
17
|
14
|
68
|
11
|
15
|
69
|
6
|
13
|
70
|
9
|
3
|
Total
|
9362
|
9563
|
And here they are in handy chart form:
Men outnumber women significantly between the ages of 18 and
30, but then women slightly outnumber men nearly all the way until the 60s when the genders roughly even out again. In total there are slightly more women (9563)
then men (9362) who appear to be active on the website.
So that’s quite a few people! That’s 20,000 active users in
a city of 4.2 million. At first glance that means only about one in 200 people
are using RSVP dating, but the figures can be narrowed down quite a bit more
than that. Users have to over 18, and there aren’t all that many people on the site past
their 40s. Australians have an average life expectancy of 82 years, so we can
estimate that there are about 50,000 people in Melbourne of any given age (ie.
50,000 people who are currently 23, or 31, or 47). So using ballpark figures
there should be around 750,000 people aged between 25 and 40 here in Melbourne.
There are 5431 male and 5484 female profiles on the site within that age group.
750,000/10915 = 68.71, so around one in 70 younger adults in Melbourne are active users on the site.
750,000/10915 = 68.71, so around one in 70 younger adults in Melbourne are active users on the site.
This figure we can increase somewhat more. If you include
profiles without profile pictures then it goes up by about 25%, and
if you include users that have been online only within the last six months
there’s another increase of about 25%. If you also push it out to having only
been online in the last year (admittedly a bit of a stretch) then the figures
can as much as double.
Then of course, there are profiles on the site seeking gay
relationships. If we describe our self as a ‘male’ and say that we’re looking
for not just females, but males too, then the number of search results increases
by another 5-10%. This occurs when you swap the genders around as well.
So the bottom line is that about one in 70 younger adults
(aged 25-40) in Melbourne are active RSVP.com users, and more than one in 30
have at least forayed onto the website, and this is just one website. No doubt the total number of people using dating sites in Melbourne is several times this figures
In addition, there seems to be quite a high turnover of
profiles. I searched for new members that have created a profile in the past
month and it turns out this includes about 10% of all those on the website. I’m
not sure if this is because the site is still growing rapidly or because users
tend to delete their profiles after a year or so on average.
All this is accepting of course, that there aren’t a significant
number of fake profiles on the site, but browsing through a fair few of them
this doesn’t appear common. Only a handful of the ones I’ve seen (where the
profile picture is just a little too beautiful for instance) looked at all
suspicious. RSVP Dating seems pretty genuine as far as such sites go.
