The Great Age Experiment: Week 4

Part of an ongoing series, in which your intrepid correspondent offers herself as a guinea pig in an admittedly not-very scientific online dating experiment to determine, once and for all, whether a younger age on her profile will result in greater response to said profile.

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Week 4 Update

(Click here to read parts one, two, three and four in this series.)

For four weeks now your correspondent has braved the match.com trenches with a false age on her profile and posted the results. She'll admit, it was kind of fun at first, but honestly, it's getting rather boring.

Here's the scoop: 7 years' age difference did not increase the number of responses (contrary to the prelimary hypothesis), and in fact, the number of profile views is at this point exactly half the number of views of the actual-age match.com profile during the same time span.

The number of match.com emails from guys who might possibly be worthy of a meeting was exactly the same: 2. So in fact, the ratio of quality men to responses did improve, though the actual number of responses dropped in half.

Granted, the "fresh meat" factor may have contributed to the higher response rate in the previous month, when your correspondent's profile first went up (with her actual age). (Online daters tend to flock to new profiles like flies to honey, whereas they avoid older ones as if they were milk cartons past their pull date.) A new experiment would be required to test if the "fresh meat" theory actually made a difference in this case, but your correspondent is frankly sick and tired of this particular experiment, and is looking forward to being her actual age again.

(In other words, if you want to test the theory yourself, run your own damn experiment.)

The not-so scientific summary of the data

Totally unscientific lessons learned from this experiment:

1. If you're interested in quantity of profile views, winks, hotlists and emails, a tasteful black and white nude art photo on AFF will net dramatically better results than an attractive face pic on match.com
2. If you're interested in the quality of responses, match.com will return a higher ratio than AFF (duh)
3. If you're interested in pure (though admittedly raunchy) entertainment value, and you don't mind unsolicited pee-pee pics and tasteless, frequently illiterate replies, AFF is the way to go
4. For all intents and purposes, it sure as hell looks like 7 years doesn't make a damn bit of positive difference in terms of response rate. (At age 43, at least.)

In other words, ladies, stop whining that it's your age, and get up on AFF if you want a flood of email in your box.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to take down this stale profile, make some edits, and put it back up in a few weeks to take advantage of the "fresh meat" factor once again.

Over and out.

Results (Age posted on profile) Time period of data collection	match.com (43) 30 days	match.com (36) 4 weeks	aff.com (43) 4 weeks
emails received	8-10(?)	6 (plus 1 more from a winker who was then sent a "thanks for the wink" email)	84
emails from guys who might possibly be worthy of a meeting	2 (One of which was from a guy who'd gone out with your correspondent a few years ago)	2	1** **(Your correspondent did receive 2 additional emails that warranted replies for the sole purpose of lively, intellectual conversation. Seriously.)
winks/flirts received	8-10(?)	7	126
favorited/hotlisted	unknown	5 (hotlisted by a new guy, unhotlisted by another, for a total change of 0 this past week)	99
views	418	209	5,329 (1,826 in the past week) (18,599 total views since 7/29/2008, though the profile has only been active less than 7 months during that time)

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