The Demographics of Online Dating

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.

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.