OkCupid points its arrow at students
Our generation shops online, socializes online, and generally wastes a lot of time online. But until recently, we did not really date online, at least not through traditional dating sites.
Memberships to sites like Match.com and eHarmony were thought to be reserved for the divorcees from our parents’ generation, and most college students’ online dating efforts consisted of Facebook-stalking attractive people they saw around campus.
Like many college students, junior Fred Tan is not comfortable with starting a relationship over the Internet.
“I think it’s shallow,” Tan said. “Personally, I can’t ever know somebody online.”
But OkCupid, a free dating site launched in 2004, has started to change this view.
With an easy search system that led the site to be billed as the “Google of online dating,” and member-created quizzes, OkCupid’s success has been so intimidating to paid competitors that it was acquired by InterActiveCorp in February, an umbrella corporation that runs Match.com.
Austin Community College student Cameron Heikkila, who has a profile on OkCupid, was initially skeptical about the idea of online dating.
“I thought it was kind of weird, like it was only used by creeps to attract young women/men,” Heikkila said.
But eventually, OkCupid got his attention for one key reason.
“The main difference, [between OkCupid and other online dating sites] I think, is the fact that it’s free,” he said. “I’ve never tried Internet dating before now. I thought it would be fun. And also, I don’t usually have a lot of time to meet girls.”
After creating a profile and interacting on the site, Heikkila discovered the site is not creepy, as he had originally thought.
“Now the [negative] stigma is more or less gone,” he said. “I’ve met a few really nice girls who I’ve stayed in contact with. Nothing really happened, but we’re still friends.”
Although Heikkila still has his profile, he acknowledges that the site is not perfect, and some experiences have made him contemplate getting rid of his profile.
“I thought about deleting it because while I’ve met a few nice girls, a vast majority [of them] seem stuck-up and shallow,” he said. “It’s like high school again. It started to seem like it was just a faster, easier way to get rejected.”
OkCupid’s success with the younger demographic is something that is not lost on its users.
“For some reason it has attracted sort of the nerds and hipsters, more so than eHarmony or Match,” Heikkila said.
While the dating service is attracting more college students, some still prefer classic dating routes.
“I think it’s stupid,” junior Justin Welsh said. “I think if people want to meet other people they need to get out there and do it. [Online dating] is the lazy way of making a relationship.”
But OkCupid is doing more and more to create a custom-tailored experience for users.
OkCupid’s patent-pending matching system is based on different surveys that users can take. When users take a survey, they not only answer the questions, they also specify how they would want their match to answer and how important the question is to them.
OkCupid applies a point system to each user’s answers, and with the help of their own mathematical equation, determines how compatible two users’ answers are. While there is some margin for error, the more surveys users truthfully fill out, the higher chance they will have of being paired compatibly.
The surveys available to users range from classic personality tests to more outlandish surveys like the “Would You Have Been a Nazi” test and the “What Color Would Your Lightsaber Be?” test.
Users may not find their true love, but they may still meet interesting, fun people.