One of the key reasons we believe that singles events and other forms of offline dating have such a strong future is that we feel that there will always be people who prefer to meet people face-to-face to see if they have chemistry, and are daunted by the whole online dating experience.
However we’re very interested in seeing how dating sites look to improve their users’ experience.
So a new twist on online dating caught our attention this week – with the beta launch of Herway, a site where women are firmly in control. Men aren’t even allowed to search for women – they have to wait until approached!
The first thing that struck me was that finally, online dating is becoming more like real life! As any nervous guy in a bar knows – you might be able to approach the girl of your dreams, but it’s her who decides whether a date is on the cards!
But jokes aside, one of the main problems with online dating is the huge imbalance between men and women – with women getting so many more messages from men. This makes the online dating experience unsatisfactory for so many – only 22% of messages men send get a response, while women get deluged with messages as soon as they join – making it hard to know who’s genuine and interested.
I know that some people are only using online dating sites for casual hookups, but for these sites to become properly accepted, there has to be more transparency about what people are looking for – and this is very hard to get online.
However I think Herway should be praised for taking an innovative approach to this problem – if women can escape the deluge of messages they typically get on traditional sites, then they may feel more comfortable using the sites, which will make the whole experience less hit and miss.
See the Online Dating Insider’s post here for a fuller discussion of some of Herway’s key selling points – definitely one to watch!
(If you’re interested in some of the detailed data behind online dating then you have to check out OK Cupid’s blog ‘OK Trends‘ – they have some great illustrations of what works/ doesn’t work – see below for a graph showing the distribution of messages with attractiveness)
Women get a lot more messages than men, especially 'attractive' women who get over 25x the number of messages that the least attractive women get!
via OKTrends
It’s not surprising that women don’t respond when you see videos like this showing how to contact 30 women in less than 10 minutes – hardly the dream to tell the kids…
“So, how did you meet Mum?”
“Oh, I fired off 30 generic messages trying to get laid”
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That video is ridiculous. Can’t see how that would work much at all!