Last year I went to see Timaru's premier of the The Social Network at Movie Max 5. Leaving the theatre I was left inspired by what a small group of effectively college drop-outs had managed to achieve. As portrayed in the movie, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first raised to notoriety when he created a created a web site which let users compare the "hotness" of Harvard University students.
Of course, due to privacy issues and copyright laws his initial venture was fundamentally flawed. But it did get him thinking about the phenomenal potential for social databases and the rest is history..
Inspired by Zuckerberg's feats, that night I set about building a simple tool to download all of the profiles on New Zealand's premier dating site: NZ Dating. I crawled the site over a couple of nights back in November and put the following analysis together.
1. How many Members are there?
If you ever wondered just who's using NZ Dating then here's your answer:
| Sex | Sexuality | Members | Gold |
| Couple (F/F) | N/A | 28 | |
| Couple (M/F) | N/A | 2,333 | 405 |
| Couple (M/M) | N/A | 100 | 11 |
| Female | Bisexual | 1,740 | 141 |
| Female | Gay | 585 | 21 |
| Female | Straight | 11,983 | 1,154 |
| Female | Undisclosed | 1,682 | 142 |
| Male | Bisexual | 2,295 | 228 |
| Male | Gay | 6,074 | 1,142 |
| Male | Straight | 22,029 | 2,311 |
| Male | Undisclosed | 3,449 | 403 |
| Transsexual/Transgender | Bisexual | 77 | 12 |
| Transsexual/Transgender | Gay | 21 | 2 |
| Transsexual/Transgender | Straight | 43 | 8 |
| Transsexual/Transgender | Undisclosed | 177 | 18 |
| Total | | 52,616 | 5,998 |
The NZ Dating search only returns members with searchable profiles who've been online in the last three months. These are what I'll call Active Members, of which there are around 50,000. The quantity of Inactive Members and Active Members with private profiles is unknown.
Compared to National statistics males and the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community are largely over-represented while females are generally under-represented.
Gold members are paying between $15 per month or $60 per year, and with around 6,000 members that equates to between $360,000 and $1,000,000 in annual revenue for NZ Dating. Couple that with site advertising rates of $3,500 per week, along with what I'd expect are very low overheads and the site should be a tidy earner for its owners.
2. How active are those 50,000 odd members?
Of the Active Members the vast majority have been online within the current month. November showed males as being more active, which is a reversal of the prior three months.
To get an idea of how long users have been members of NZ Dating we can look at the date they last updated their profile. The profile date indicates that current members must have been members for at least this long. From this we can tell that there is definitely a proportion of members who use NZ Dating for socialising and/or casual hook-ups rather than for finding a permanent match.
What are the ages of Active Members?
The age profile graphically illustrates the huge over-representation of males and under-representation of females. Interestingly the blips at 30, 40 and 50 years would indicate that some males (in particular) are lying about their age. Women, it would seem are far more honest!
Men are more likely to lie about their age on NZ Dating.
What are some popular names?
| Rank | Female | Members | Male | Members |
| 1 | Sarah | 246 | John | 812 |
| 2 | me | 151 | Mike | 609 |
| 3 | ask me | 138 | James | 591 |
| 4 | Lisa | 135 | Mark | 481 |
| 5 | Jo | 111 | Chris | 463 |
| 6 | Amanda | 99 | Dave | 450 |
| 7 | Michelle | 93 | Steve | 444 |
| 8 | Rachel | 92 | Paul | 429 |
| 9 | Karen | 90 | David | 413 |
| 10 | Sue | 90 | Matt | 401 |
| 11 | Emma | 90 | Peter | 322 |
| 12 | Anna | 89 | Sam | 319 |
| 13 | Amy | 87 | Andrew | 314 |
| 14 | Jane | 87 | Jason | 311 |
| 15 | ask | 85 | Michael | 282 |
| 16 | Kate | 84 | Tony | 279 |
| 17 | Kim | 82 | Ben | 258 |
| 18 | k | 81 | Daniel | 242 |
| 19 | Kelly | 76 | ask | 238 |
| 20 | Jess | 74 | Rob | 225 |
With the top 20 female names containing 'me', 'ask me' and 'ask' in 2nd, 3rd and 15th places respectively while the top 20 male names only has 'ask' in 19th place, it's clear that females prefer more privacy around details like their name.
Women prefer privacy when it comes to intimate details like their name.
How about some Social Habits?
Around one in ten are prepared to disclose a mild to extreme drinking affliction while the vast majority report that they are responsible social drinkers.
It would seem there are a lot of smokers on NZ Dating. Just over half of women (and a little more for men) have declared themselves as non-smokers. And of the declared smokers, it's women who lead the charge in all three categories.
The sample of smokers is sufficient to do further analysis on. For this chart I've compared smokers against the total number of members in each age group (by year). The standout features of the chart are the number of young females in particular who're declaring themselves as smokers and the downward slope by age. In part this will be due to smokers dying younger than non-smokers.
Over half of the women aged 18-20 on NZ Dating smoke.
And how's their health looking?
Since NZ dating allows members to disclose their measurements in given weight and height categories, we can take the combination of those categories to create a crude BMI Index for the combination of each weight and height Category. Applying this against the BMI Categories yields these results:
Members need to disclose both their weight and height to calculate a BMI index, and around a third of females and a sixth of males prefer not to disclose this information. Of the remainder that do disclose their measurements, only half the the males and a third of the females fall into the Normal category for BMI. The percentage of females is greater than males in both Obese categories as well as both underweight categories.
Only one third of female and half of male NZ Dating members disclose their BMI as being Normal
The numbers are sufficient to do a further analysis, although I expect the bulk of females and males who have chosen not to disclose their measurements would also be in an abnormal category. The main feature noted with the chart is that the male BMI increases with age while the female BMI levels out at around 40 years.
Credits:
I've used Oracle Database 10g Express for the data storage and analysis and Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Express to do the website crawl.