Friday News Roundup: The OkCupid Blog

Apparently, OkCupid, the free dating site whose (lack of) price tag somehow makes it seem sketchy, has a blog.

And it’s actually pretty good. Unfortunately, most of their posts have to do with maximizing results on online dating, and they spend a lot of time building charts and graphs (which seems like the perfect job for a hopelessly romantic statistician) whose value and relevance we have to question.

But it does make for an interesting read.

Today, we want to highlight two posts in particular.

The first is a dissertation on the role your profile picture plays in your success (or lack thereof) in online dating.

A quasistatistical study of OkCupid users reveals that everything Match.com ever told us is wrong!

Showing your face in your profile picture? Don’t do it!

Posting a “MySpace” shot (i.e., a picture you took by holding a crappy Webcam over your head and pouting up at the camera)? You’ll get more messages!

Guys—have a six pack that rivals The Situation’s? Show it off!

While all of these profile picture faux pas might attract more attention, the lovestruck statisticians don’t really have a way of measuring which types of people who contact these brooding meatheads.

And so the only really useable information this post provides is their take on girls showing cleavage. The economists who dropped out of grad school to fall in love found that women who show cleavage get more messages that lead to extended correspondence (i.e., not just one message that says, “Nice tits”) than women who don’t.

But you have to take the rest of the data with a grain of salt.

Yes, the MySpace girls might get more messages than the English majors who use more “normal” headshots, but the guys who contact the MySpacers might be equally emo, unemployed 17-year-olds—not the type of guys the English majors would necessarily want to meet.

Then again, the girls who post MySpace pictures are probably pretty compatible with the guys who post shirtless pictures. So maybe the lesson is, it’s just easier to find dates if you’re the kind of girl who makes a kissy face in her profile picture.

The other finding worth noting is that people who post pictures of themselves doing something interesting tend to get more messages than the people who post a neck-up version of the best photo ever taken of them.

When we look at someone’s profile picture, we expect the photo to be at least 10 percent more attractive than the person is in real life. After all, inordinately hot photos attract the most attention, right?

But after a guy’s first month on an online dating sight, he’s going to know that if she looks too good to be true, she probably is.

And you don’t want to start competing for guys on looks alone. So post a photo of yourself doing something you love. Or post a quirky photo. It’ll probably take you farther than that bikini shot from the summer you had Mono.