US: Men more likely to be satisfied with dating app experiences. Is it because they make friends?
When it comes to executing a marketing strategy, understanding why your competitors’ customers are choosing them over you can be just as valuable as knowing your own brand’s strengths. Targeted audience analysis can help marketers understand the ins and outs of a highly specific group - from online dating users' statistics to mobile gamers; from Heineken drinkers to Honda drivers - allowing you to position your brand or product in the right place to take advantage.
Using its targeting capabilities, YouGov Self-serve - our fully self-serviced research platform - allows marketers to quickly, easily and cheaply survey an audience and ask them whatever they want.
In just a few clicks, you can target an audience of your choice (including customers of one or more of 1,500 brands in UK or 2,200 brands in US), and then create your custom poll using our easy survey builder. Within 24 hours, you could have the answers that make the difference between failure and success for your upcoming product launch, brand campaign or crisis management strategy.
In this piece, we used our survey tools to poll users of dating apps in the US.
But what might be fueling this disparity? The main dating apps about their experience of online dating. And as interesting as the online dating statistics are, analyzing the data by gender makes for even more revealing reading.
Firstly, men are markedly more likely to say their experience on these match-making apps has been good (55% vs 37%). Nearly two in five women say their experience has been bad (31%) compared to 39% of men.
But what might be fuelling this disparity?
US women less likely to get appealing matches than men
Exactly half of all American women who currently use online dating apps say the profiles they have generally come across are not very appealing or not appealing at all (50%). This sentiment is shared by only 29% of men, who are more than twice as likely to say that the profiles they see are “very appealing” (28% vs 12%).
Men come across fake profiles more often
We measured responses about two different kinds of fake profiles in the poll – spam/fraudulent accounts and otherwise genuine accounts but with misleading details. It is the first kind of fake that men feel they come across at a higher rate.
Two-fifths of men say they come across such suspect accounts very often compared to just under a quarter of women (41% vs 23%). Two-fifths of women say they don’t come across these types of accounts often compared to half as many men (40% vs 19%) as per YouGov's online dating statistics .
The other kind of fake is perceived as being prevalent – equally so among both men and women. Seven in ten men (71%) and a nearly identical share of women (69%) say they come across accounts that, let’s be kind here, fudge aspects of their profile, such as height or appearance, very or fairly often.
Non-romantic friends on dating apps? Men have better luck
Seven in ten men have made non-romantic friends through online dating apps (68%). Although the share is much lower among women, the 46% rate is still fairly robust for platforms that are designed with romance in mind. As per YouGov's online dating statistics, overall, 59% of Americans have made friends through online dating apps.
Americans likelier than not to say that dating apps provide a good user experience
Nearly three-fifths of all US residents currently using dating apps say their user experience (with specific reference to functionality and usability) has been very or fairly good (59%). While the rate is certainly higher among men (61%), a majority of women also feel the same way (54%).
Still, nearly a quarter of all Americans have had an overall indifferent experience with the UX of these apps (23%), and a fifth rate the UX as bad (17%).
YouGov's online dating statistics does a great job of providing an industry overview, but brands could gain even more value by probing consumers of rival apps to identify weaknesses and strengths and chart their path to increasing market share.
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Methodology
YouGov polled 310 American users of dating apps online on 9 December 2023. The survey was carried out through YouGov Surveys: Self-serve. Data is weighted by age, gender, race, political affiliation, education level and region. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Self-serve.