Increase in Promiscuous Girls Online

PlentyofFish.com has recently released a press release which states that the promiscuity in the women on the site has doubled since 2004. According to their site's statistics, 18% of it's female dating population have selected the "intimate encounter" option in their profiles, up from 9% four years ago.

So what does this mean for the men on the site?

You'd think that an increase in promiscuity of the women on the site would mean an increase in guys getting more action. However, in my opinion, these numbers are not reliable and will likely not have any significant impact on a guy's attempt to get laid from the Plenty of Fish dating site. There are two reasons why I feel this is insignificant:

1. Increase of Bait and Switch Profiles

We've all seen these before. Profiles of beautiful women who message you out of the clear blue, proclaiming their interest in you, except that they only communicate through another paid dating site which you would need to sign up for if you want to talk to them. Seriously, I can't believe there are guys that fall for this stuff.

Because Plenty of Fish is now the top online dating site in the world, with over 10 million users, and free, it is only natural that there would be an increase of these fake bait and switch profiles. The larger the market share, the larger the opportunity for spammers to take advantage of that market.

2. Online Promiscuity Increases Selectivity

Lets suppose that this increase in promiscuity is real and that there are in fact women online that are simply out to have sex. If this were the case, then I would think it'd be even harder for the average man on Plenty of Fish to attract these types of women. Why? Selectivity.

We already know that the odds in online dating are strongly skewed in favor of women. Well, this is even more true for women who are looking for "intimate encounters." These girls will get way more attention then a girl looking for normal dates. Thus, the competition is higher and their standards are likely higher as well.

In this regard, an average looking woman in pursuit of an intimate encounter will likely only pursue the highest quality, best looking men on the site. This means, that your average guy doesn't even come close to having a shot with these women.

In the end, I don't think this changes the online dating game. In reality, the only reason for PlentyofFish to send out this press release is to attract more men to the site who believe they have a chance at some random play.

YouTube PlentyofFish Dating Rant

I just found this video on YouTube of a guy ranting about his frustrations with the PlentyofFish dating site. He basically bitches and moans about the things that women do, which is not fair for him. I'll let you watch the video first and then I'll give my commentary and analysis afterward:




Did you watch it? Notice how this guys is completely frustrated by his attempts at online dating? I'm not surprised, he is a typical guy on the site and is going about it all wrong. He gripes about three things in the video and I'd like to address all of them and break it down.

Girls Not Revealing Their Correct 'Body Type'

This is to be expected on any dating site not just on Plenty of Fish. He basically accuses larger obese women of putting themselves in the wrong categories. This does happen quite often and not just with women. Men fudge their statistics too, particularly the height category. Essentially everyone nudges their personal traits to be more favorable, after all, they are trying to attract mates as best they can.

So, you can't stop women from fudging their profiles, but you can screen them easily if you know what to look for. For example, if she only has head shots in all of her pictures or if she put's "I'd rather not say" in the body type category, then there's a good chance that she is larger and you just move on (assuming you're not attracted to larger women of course).

Who's Who?

His second gripe is regarding girls who put up pictures of themselves with another girl or a bunch of other girls. I somewhat agree with him here. It is hard to tell who is the owner of the profile if the only pictures they show are group shots. However, there is a rule on the Plenty of Fish dating site that says your main picture should be a head shot of just you. So, assuming that rule is enforced then you should be able to tell the face behind the profile.

Helloooooo

The main reason I wanted to show this video is because this guy's last gripe is EXACTLY what I talked about in my last post about subject lines. He complains that a girl chewed him out because all he did was send her a message saying, "Hello."

From the experiment I ran in the last post, we saw that in the female profile, 39 out of 60 emails had subject lines that simply read: hello, hi or hey. With that many guys sending you crappy messages that just say 'hello', it's not hard for me to imagine a girl flipping out on a random dude every now and then. It's kind of like listening to kids in the back of the car, constantly asking, "are we there yet?" Eventually, one of the parents will snap and tell those little ankle bitters to shut the f#@k up.

Plenty of Fish Subject Lines that really SUCK!

We know that online dating is very much lopsided towards women. Women tend to get a significantly higher amount of emails/messages to them then guys receive from women. For example, it's not uncommon for an attractive woman to receive 50-100 emails a day versus maybe one to two, for a guy of equal attractiveness.

I'm sure of this because I have seen the dark side my friends. Yes, I created an experimental fake profile of a woman on the Plenty of Fish dating site, and what I saw shocked me.

Let's take a look at what the "other side" sees.

[WARNING: a few days after doing this, I had both my personal real account and my experiment account deleted. The PlentyofFish system seems to have several methods for detecting duplicate accounts, so you may not want to try this at home]

Not long after getting the profile setup by loading up a few pictures of a female I grabbed from another site and writing a quick generic description, I was quickly swarmed by dudes who wanted to IM me. Seriously, the little boxes were popping up every five seconds. This annoyed me to no end, so I quickly disabled the IM feature.

I let the account sit for about a day and a half and this is what I got:



In a little over a day, I received three pages of emails from different guys. That's approximately 60 emails total! This is pretty insane considering that the woman was of average looks and my own personal (male) profile barely gets one or two emails in a month, let alone every few minutes as this account did.

So one thing we can take away from this little experiment is that, if you are a guy, you have A LOT of competition for PlentyofFish dating. Not exactly a comforting thought is it?

But Wait!

It does gets better. After further analysis, the experiment showed that despite a tremendous amount of competition, a large majority of those guys, like 95% of them, are pathetic when it comes to online dating. Thus the competition is also weak.

The most notable weakness is the lack of any thought into how they initiate contact with a female on Plenty of Fish. If you look at the above screen shot again you'll notice that a large number of subject lines are simply lines like this: "Hey", "Hey there", "Hello" or "Hi."

A quick count through all of the subject lines gives me a total of 39 guys out of 60 who sent an email with some variation of "Hi" in the subject line. That's 65%! On top of that, the remainder subject lines were either really lame, rude or vulgar.



Now lets take a second and put ourselves in the shoes of this woman. If you are a busy attractive female and are receiving 60 emails a day from random men, whose email are you more likely to open? The ones that all say the same thing in the subject line or that one message with something clever, intriguing or at least different than a simple "Hey"?

Keep this in mind, as the next post about POF email messages, will examine the body of the messages that were sent to the experimental account and trust me, they're not pretty...