1. Women are more likely to get responses than guys. For a guy who writes a woman on OKCupid without any previous flirtation, he has a 25% chance of getting a reply from her. But for women who are cold-writing a guy — there’s a 40% chance she will get a reply.
2. Women’s perception of men’s attractiveness may be more warped than men’s perception of women’s appearance. With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”
3. Still, men tend to email the most attractive women. While guys can clearly appreciate women in the center of the attractiveness spectrum,  that doesn’t mean they don’t aim for the top. Men of all levels of attractiveness tend to send the most emails to the few women rated across the board as a 5.
4. Message length doesn’t appear to matter. Rudder was sure that longer messages would up a person’s chances of getting a response from the object of their affection. But it’s not true. Whether a message is the length of a tweet or the length of a novella doesn’t seem to matter in terms of chances for a reply. The numbers listed in item #1 hold tight — men have a 25% chance of getting a response and women have a 40% chance.
5. If you don’t hear back quickly, you probably won’t. Rudder took a look at the length of time elapsed before a person replies to a message and how it corresponds to the likelihood that they will respond. In a fascinating twist, half of all replies are sent by the seven-hour mark. There’s a big drop-off from there in the chances of a reply. “Seven hours is the half-life of your hopes and dreams,” joked Rudder.
6. Not all replies turn into dates. Getting a reply on OKCupid is half the battle — but it isn’t everything. There’s only about a 30% chance that a reply will turn into an actual conversation — a correspondence that lasts for three exchanges or longer.
7. Despite the startling statistics, people do fall in love through the site. Every day, about 500 people disable their OKCupid profiles for a very specific reason: they met someone through the site that they’re embarking on a relationship with.

What have your online dating experiences been like? Which of these facts surprises you the most?

How, exactly, does online dating work? In this perfect-for-Valentine’s-Day TED-Ed lesson, OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder walks you through how the dating website does its matching — by using a carefully-honed algorithm to create a compatibility rating for two potential daters. In this fascinating video, Rudder shares how the site lets daters decide which factors are most important to them — and then crunches the numbers behind the scenes.

TED-Ed animator Franz Palomares jumped at the chance to animate this lesson — for a very specific reason. The TED-ED blog interviewed him to find out why.

We heard there was a special reason you wanted to work on this particular lesson. What was your inspiration?

The general inspiration was very personal. Seven years ago, I met my wife on a dating website! So I felt a great attachment to sharing this lesson.

Artistically, I had a lot of different inspirations. I knew immediately that I wanted to split it into two categories. One a very personal and human side, represented by hand-drawn characters — the match that is being made by the algorithm. And then a technical side, represented by the 3D words and the heart transitions. The hearts falling are based on the raining code from the Matrix. I thought it would be a fun way to indicate that the program was working.

That male character certainly looks familiar. How did you decide what the characters would look like in the animation?

Ha. The two characters that represent the users were easy. I knew from the moment I took on this lesson that I would work in some drawings of my wife and myself. From there, I decided I should include a character that looks like Christian to be the narrator.

Read the rest of the interview on the TED-Ed blog »