Are you looking for love? How long do you have without dating someone romantically? If you are not one of those people who knows a lot of people or, simply, your occupations do not allow you to socialize enough to get a date, it is likely that, at this point in the XNUMXst century, you have already tried or at least know of the existence of smartphone apps capable of finding and introducing you to your next better half. Perhaps it is even the lucky one who will start a good relationship with you this year.
It would be very rare that today you have not at least heard the word Tinder. That is the name of the most popular dating app in the world today. According to the specialized data portal Statista.com, this system has an average of 57 million active users per month and, only in 2021, it was downloaded 78 million times worldwide. What is this software about and why is it so in demand?
Tinder uses a sophisticated algorithm that crosses the information of its users and makes recommendations for possible partners according to your interests and theirs, taking into account the geographical location of both. In other words, it shows you the people who have the best chance of getting along with you and who are closest to you. What you can do, then, is to see the photos and profiles on this list as a gallery that moves by sliding your finger on the screen of your phone and classifying those that interest you (swipe to the right) and those that don't ( swipe left). If one of those you saved as good prospects does the same to you, Tinder notifies both of you that they've found a "match" and enables them the option to chat and get to know each other. From there it is up to you if the matter progresses or not.
But this is not the only or the first application dedicated to finding couples. Tinder was launched in the year 2011, but Badoo was founded in 2006 and today it competes with Tinder for the first place in some regions of the world and also in some age groups. This means, for example, that Badoo is more used than Tinder among Europeans and also among people over 40. Tinder dots in the United States and among the youngest. In Latin America, always according to Statista.com, both platforms compete closely. But, if we go further back, the true pioneer was Match.com, a portal that saw the light of day in 1995.
The use of these systems seems to have had a strong boost during the pandemic. This is how we reported it in a work by Últimas Noticias October 2021, where we verified through Google Trends that searches for the word "Tinder" in Venezuela skyrocketed in 2020, just after the coronavirus forced most of us to stay at home. A study from Stanford University, published in 2019, stated that even then in the United States 39% of heterosexual couples and 60% of homosexual couples met through these types of applications. In other words, digital matchmaking has an important presence in social life. According to a report from El País, one in five weddings that took place in Spain in 2019 it was of couples who met online. And more recently, the anthropologist and biologist Helen Fisher, scientific adviser to the Match group, which owns several of the most famous platforms in this field, including Tinder, affirms that "40% of today's appointments come from the internet."
Against this background, in Data UN We ask ourselves: How will things be in Venezuela? So we decided to dedicate our digital poll for the week leading up to February 14, Valentine's Day, to asking about the use of dating apps. We publish the survey in latestnews.com.ve and our social networks and, between Monday 6 and Thursday 9 February, 353 people participated. The responses were organized according to the sex and age of the participants and we applied a weighting factor to the data according to the proportions of the distribution by age and sex from the 2011 National Population and Housing Census.
The results are the following:
One in 4
When we ask the audience of Últimas Noticias If they had used a dating app in the last year, we found that 26,39% of the participants said yes. This indicates that more than a quarter, that is, one in four, have recently searched for a partner on the Internet. The vast majority do not use them, but taking into account the specificity of these mobile applications, we can say that the proportion of those who do use them is not unimportant.
If we review these total results according to sex, we can see that in the case of women the figure drops to 22,16% while in the case of men it rises to 28,35%.
Now, who uses these types of systems more, the young or the elderly? Common sense says that the former, and in fact we verified it with our survey, where the group with the highest percentage of use is that of those between 15 and 30 years of age. There the thing reached 38,78%. As age goes up, the ratio goes down. In the group from 31 to 46 years old, these applications reach 23,08%. In the population between 46 and 60 years of age, their use reaches 15,44% and among those over 60 only 2,13% claim to use them.
When we combine the two variables, we can see that in almost all age groups, males showed a higher percentage than females in the use of dating apps. Only in the 46 to 60 age group were women slightly higher than men.
What a great idea
One very interesting finding from our survey emerged when we asked participants, both those who use dating apps and those who don't, what they thought about these tools. We obtained that half, that is, 50,54% consider that dating applications are a good or excellent idea. 28,32% say they don't care and 21% have a negative opinion.
Logically, when we separate these responses between those who do use the applications and those who do not, we find that sympathy for them increases to 77% in the former. Only 6,4% think it was a bad idea after using them.
When distinguishing gender, we have that 53,63% of men think that dating apps are a good or excellent idea, while this opinion reaches 43,87% in the case of women.
By age we also observe good percentages of positive opinion, over 50%, in all groups except the over 60s, where 36,2% said that they are a good or excellent idea.
tinder is the leader
Now let's see what is the most used dating app in Venezuela. There are no surprises, Tinder proved to be the most popular in our survey, both among men and women and among the population between 15 and 45 years of age.
36,65% of the total named Tinder among the apps they use the most to find a partner. Badoo reaches 20,55% and Grindr, an app aimed especially at the sex-diverse population, is used by 16,63% of users who claimed to use this type of tool.
Separating by gender, the proportions are similar, except in the case of Grindr, which was reported only by male participants.
What are they looking for?
By asking the participants to answer what their objective is with these applications, we obtained data as interesting as that, in the case of women, a clear majority, 57,76%, affirm that they are only looking to meet people. In the total number of users this response was obtained by 42,21% and in men 31,58%.
Almost a quarter, 24,15%, clearly say that they are looking for a relationship. This figure rises to 34,32% in women and falls to 20,47% in men.
It is also noteworthy that those who answered that they were "only looking for sex" were exclusively male participants, where in fact this response reached 25,89%. No woman answered that.
The distribution by age shows a behavior similar to the total in all cases. We can only highlight that the majority of those who answered that they are only looking for sex are between the ages of 31 and 45.
From screen to reality
We were able to verify that, among those who use Tinder or similar apps, more than two-thirds have gone on a real date with someone they met through the application. We are talking about 66,77% effectiveness.
We also note that there are more men who claim to have consummated meetings in the flesh, 73,18%, while in women the thing is practically divided in half: 49,04% said that they did have the date and 50,96 % he said no.
Those who raise the average to two thirds are the youngest, while in those over 46 the level of appointment completion remains at 50%.
Does physique matter?
We also asked the participants what aspect is most important when choosing a potential partner on a dating app. 56,43% affirmed that they take more into account the description, that is, the interests of the person and their way of life, while 43,57% responded that they pay more attention to the photo, that is, to the physical appearance of the person. she.
It was striking that the importance of the image is greater in women 47,92% than in men 41,99%.
And if we thought that, perhaps, it was the youngest who assigned more weight to the physique than to internal characteristics, then it turns out that we were wrong. In our survey, the group of those between 46 and 60 years old was the one that showed the highest percentage of those who take the photo more into account than the description. In fact, it was the only sector in which this response reached more than half (52,38%).
Majority agree
We ended our survey by asking participants to rate their experience using dating apps. We have to say that, in all cases, both the total and the distributions by sex and age, more than 50% of the responses corresponded to a positive evaluation.
More than 58% said that their experience was good or very good. 31,7% had a regular experience and just over 10% described their experience as bad or very bad.
In the case of women, the positive assessment rises above 63% and in men it reaches 56%.
When we separate these responses by age, it stands out that the group with the most people who are happy with dating apps is between 46 and 60 years old. There we obtained that 71,43% described their experience as good or very good. Then comes the group from 31 to 45 years old, with 66,67% giving a positive assessment. Among young people between the ages of 15 and 30, positive experiences reached 52,65%.
Looking at these data it is clear that the Internet is a useful medium for an increasing number of tasks and to help us satisfy a growing number of needs. It is not just about intellectual activities, such as information searches or entertainment consumption. The digitization of many productive processes and social dynamics is a reality. You can even find love through your cell phone. People of all sexes and ages are involved in it. And it seems that things are not bad at all.
Do you dare to give the algorithm a try?
