Sign up. Sign in. Picture this online dating scenario:. Sadly, this is a typical story. Some people, however, get much better results. We will not be dispensing generic advice. At least in terms of using your time efficiently, your messages should be much shorter.
The y-axis is reply percentage; the x-axis is message length, in characters; and the two lines are as follows. Red is the ratio of messages that get any reply. Green is the ratio of messages that get a reply that in turn gets replied to by the original sender. The idea is that this is the ultimate goal of the first message: to start a conversation with someone. Messages sent by guys are, overall, only about half as likely to get replies as similar messages from women. All those were actual first messages, by the way.
Now, our graph clearly shows that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to compose a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. If we imagine that people type messages at about characters per minute, we get the following table:. Yes, brevity is key. Something we learned building SparkNotes, in our pre-OkCupid days.
Savor this advice, men, for there are not many things in your world that fit this paradigm. For women, the most efficient message is even shorter. The shortest messages get almost the best absolute response rate, and the reply rate actually goes down as messages approach extreme length. Apparently, after about words characters , you start scaring people off.
A message like that is the online equivalent of a face tattoo. Of your life story. Incredibly enough, the optimal first outreach from a woman to a man is just 50 characters long! On the one hand, such a superficial reality is depressing. No human has read any actual user messages.
