Insights

• As many as one-in-three people are dating online

What do people look for?

Race and class are the most important factors to daters

In 2014, BuzzFeed ran an experiment in which one of their writers built a mock-Tinder with stock photos. She found that when someone viewed the person in the Tinder profile picture as “working-class,” they would swipe “yes” 13 percent of the time. But, when they considered the person “middle-class,” they swiped “yes” between 36 and 39 percent of the time. The study also found that people preferred a potential partner to be of the mixed or ambiguous race instead of a blatantly different race than their own. OkCupid co-founder, Christian Rudder, confirmed her findings. He noted, “When you’re looking at how two American strangers behave in a romantic context, the race is the ultimate confounding factor.”

A 2014 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences does note that this phenomenon isn’t as bad as it might seem. According to the researchers at the University of California San Diego, the majority of heterosexuals on OKCupid did contact people of another race or at least answer messages from them.

Why do people use online dating sites

• People turn to online dating for a variety of reasons – 48% do it for fun, while some look for more meaningful relationships and one-in-ten are simply looking for sex (13%)

Safety & Security

• People share information with others too easily when they are dating online, with a quarter (25%) admitting they share their full name publicly on their dating profile. One-in-ten have shared their home address, and the same number have shared naked photos of themselves this way, exposing them to risk. These concerns are well-founded – 55% have experienced some form of threat or problem while dating online. And, people that use online dating are twice as likely to experience an IT security incident than people that don’t (41% vs 20%), primarily due to their increased level of online activity in general
• Even though lying is one of the most hated aspects of online dating, 57% of online daters lie to each other, faking a range of attributes such as their names, marital status, location and appearance People are concerned for their safety when they date online, with some of the main concerns involving worries about IT security – for example, 63% are concerned about the device they use for online dating becoming infected and 61% are concerned about their data being stolen or leaked from the dating app or service itself
• Protection is also an issue for people that indulge in online dating. Just 27% of online daters use a security solution to protect their device and 16% do nothing at all to protect themselves as they see no risk

People that date online are most likely to be:

• 33.8 years old on average
• Working full-time (63%)
• Slightly more likely to be male than female (39% of men date online vs 25% of women)
• Device-savvy – they have around 5 mobile devices compared to the usual 3 per household
• They are most likely to work as medium-level managers (20%) or be highly qualified specialists such as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers (19%)

Sources

• Kaspersky.com
• MentalFloss.com