4 interesting facts about online dating messaging

What do the stats say about why you’re not getting any responses?

A study called What Happens After You Both Swipe Right: A Statistical Description of Mobile Dating Communication made some interesting observations about the way we interact with each other via mobile dating applications (MDAs). Here are a few of the researchers’ more interesting findings:

1. Rejection comes in the form of silence

After matching, a pair of users can begin conversing. The nature of MDA text messages—and
modern communication methods—means that rejections will most likely come in the form of
silence (Ansari & Klinenberg, 2015). Tong & Walther (2011) report that women are more likely to
not respond to date requests than they are to send rejection emails. In online dating as a whole,
26 percent of men responded to received messages, while women only responded to 16 percent of total
messages (Fiore et al., 2010). Though conversing on MDAs, like most MTMs, is dictated by
speed, users can still take the time to craft their messages and present themselves in the best
light.

2. ‘Initiators maintain a slight level of dominance’

Among 18,917,884 messages in 2,088,486 conversations, men sent 56 percent of all messages,and
initiated 79 percent of conversations. Initiators, or the first person to send a message in a
conversation, sent 54 percent of all messages. However, of non­-initial messages, initiators sent 51 percent of messages. This suggests that though initiators maintain a slight level of dominance in
conversations, initiator to non­-initiator message ratios tend to balance out as conversations
progress.

3. A large portion of conversations last one message

There were 2,088,486 conversations that were comprised of 18,917,884 million messages that equated to roughly 9 messages per conversation on average. However, this value does not give an accurate
description? 39 percent of conversations contain just one, unreciprocated message. A further 11 percent of conversations contain just two messages. This essentially means that only half of all
conversations have over two messages. As such, the distribution of messages is quite skewed.

4. Another chunk don’t go much further

In addition to the 39 percent of conversations that consist of only one message, a further
10 percent contain two or more messages that are unreciprocated. That leaves 1,064,537
conversations (51 percent) where initiators receive a response, called ‘mutual conversations’ from this
point forward. There could be a variety of reasons for unreciprocated matches: recipients could
be inactive users, uninterested in the other user, or unimpressed by the initial message. As
such, the bulk of our following analysis is on mutual conversations. Mutual conversations
encompass 16,983,735 messages, or 90 percent of the total messages from the original dataset.