DataCrunchies

Watching Amy Webb’s TED Talk - How I hacked Online Dating – first gave me the idea to create a guide to improve online dating profiles. Webb is a digital strategist who explains how she improved her own online dating profile with a bit of code and lot of imagination. Her strategy proved right because she found what she was after: she met her future husband online.

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I then read Dataclysm (2014), a book written by Christian Rudder, data scientist at OkCupid since 2009. He analysed billions of dating data and extracted common patterns from users’ behaviours. If strictly speaking everyone doesn’t act the same, general trends still show up.

I grew curious: if a majority of online users reacted the same way to certain signals, what were those signals?

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From there, I combined both my passion, data journalism, to my sporadic hobby, online dating, and went on the hunt for numbers. I started to compile all studies made by diverse dating app companies (Tinder, Hinge, POF, etc) and gleaned statistics from various books, surveys and experiments to answer that single question: How to statistically improve online dating profiles?

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It's not rocket science, and while reading you may think that some of the tricks won't work for you. I am not pretenting all stats are applyable to everyone, I simply gathered at the same place what I found could be good advices.

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Enjoy your reading!