Dating apps are tailored to people in the top X% of attractiveness. Don't take it personally. Most people aren't successful on them, even the ones who get a lot of matches.
They aren't. I'm in the top 1% for income and top 5% for looks. I used to get no matches on tinder. I asked a few female friends to come up with a profile they thought would be more attractive. After I saw what they came up with (I have a boat, I fly first class, I'm in a holiday in Europe) I deleted it and move them to acquaintances.
The type of woman who would find that sort of thing attractive is _not_ the type of woman who I'd want to sleep with let alone have a relationship with.
Something about your story doesn't add up. I would certainly consider myself NOT in the top %5 of looks, and get plenty of matches. And I'm not looking for trashy women who are only into material things either.
On looking at the average person I see on the street. Do you not have eyes?
>and get plenty of matches
Matches are the first step, then you have chatting, organizing a date and then a hookup/relationship. The attrition rate is abysmal at every level. It's just not time efficient to use online dating.
Your pics either sucked or you're not as attractive as you think you are. You don't need pics of yourself being rich. Or maybe you're older (he's 27).
I agree that among the pool of people on these apps, there are lots of matches that would work out among average-looking people. So why doesn't that happen?
It's because a lot of attraction is based on things that photos and profiles can't convey. The medium of "digital app" is just very, very wrong for optimizing dating.
I've seen research that the most efficient way to handle dating is in-person speed dating.
Especially for men. The worst thing is the imbalance. Compatibility in a long-term relationship is certainly based on factors other than looks for both sexes but, like it or not, all relationships start with basic attraction. Women's basic attraction comes from their looks in the vast majority of cases. But for most men, it has to come from somewhere else. Usually status, power, ability, humour etc. So it works absolutely fine for women, but is a complete non-starter for the average man.
I'm not surprised speed-dating is more efficient. My experience with online dating is that even if I find a woman physically attractive I might not find her attractive in real life. We might simply not hit it off, or there can even be other factors like smell that are off-putting. Speed dating eliminates those immediately as well as allowing people to show off non-physical attractive qualities. I still don't think it's optimal for men, though. The best way is to get good at something and show it off in public. Like playing in a band, public speaking, leading and commanding respect of other men etc. That can make otherwise physically repulsive men attractive. There are countless examples.
E.g. slow down showing profiles when they have more than X pending matches. An ex told me she'd paid for Gold on Tinder once out of curiosity (lets you see how many have swiped right on you). Her pending matches were in the 4 digits. These profiles "soak up" a lot of the time and attention of people on these platforms without creating a real chance of matches for users who aren't super aggressively matching everyone.
This again trains for a behaviour where men match a lot, and women can afford to be very selective.
But reducing the displays of the most popular profiles so their pending matches queue is never very deep won't do anything good for revenue.
Another option is to train models to predict likely matches, and sort displays accordingly, but that again won't do much for revenue, because it would mean average men would be more likely to be shown women closer to their attractiveness level which there is less competition for rather than women with 4 figure deep queues of waiting matches.
Remember, most dating sites make money from making it hard enough to get a match that people pay for premium services to increase their chance. They have a built in incentive to exaggerate the possibilities while maintaining friction in actually meeting someone. It must be hard for you to find someone for most of them to do well.
If you can convince people to pay for a less perversely incentivised model, maybe. E.g. a "pay per match" model maybe, if well protected against scammers. But suspect it'd be a very hard sell.
My working theory is on a dating app woman have unlimited access, so tend to go torwards the top 99.9% of men.
Solution: Shadow ban hyper attractive people.
Solution 2: Only show people a similar level of attractiveness as yourself.
Much more likely you don't put enough effort into your profile or you have something on, that is a red flag for most women.
I disagree with that the top man can not date more than a few.
A single woman needs a romantic partner let's say ever three months, a man can have one every day. We see this in gay men having 500+ average sexual partners. Gay men can have sex as much as they want, because of access.
Top 0.1% of men can also have sex when ever they want, they are getting constant matches with 6,7,8 level woman. Well below their level, because its easier to get people below your level into bed without courting.
They have sex, he doesn't call her back, she is mad at men for another three months.
A few men can soak up all of the above average woman, considering they are on a bell curve and are rare them self. Only a subset of people are even on these dating apps.
Average looking people don't have this problem, because they are happy with matching other average woman who the top men are not interested in.
Summary: top men can date below their own level because a 7 woman, three below them is still very beautiful. But a 7 man can't date three below their own level because a 4 is not attractive and not worth the time using a app for.
I'm pointing out that the causal relationship the poster is making might be wrong. The issue could be the behavior if the poster, not some systemic issue with women.
Couple that with trying to predict likely matches and weight towards showing profiles which are likely to match and you would likely approach solution 2 without explicitly focusing only on attractiveness.
But at the same time you'll have killed a major revenue driver for a lot of dating sites: frustration over few matches.
I think trying to move away from images is a good idea, so people can showcase their worth to better compete with the physical gifted people who benefit from images.
I thought of a idea where you have to have a reel 10second video showcasing 5 traits
Let's say, you see the list of options and choose
Cooking Humour Adventure Intellect Strength
Say those are your traits, your reel will show case them. With the aim of creating relationships rather than hook ups.
The typical user stays only for weeks or months at a time. Many users come back rarely enough that e.g. Bumble offers a lifetime premium membership for less than it costs you to renew their quarterly membership a third time ($149 for the lifetime membership I think), which should tell you something about how long they expect even the most committed users to hang around.
Which makes sense. After all, if they do their job, you'll meet someone and not need the app any more, and if they do nothing for you, you'll get tired of them and disappear eventually. Only a very narrow subset of users use the non-hookup focused sites for very long.
The challenge then is that this puts a very severe ceiling on your customer acquisition cost. Who knows what their average lifetime value of a user is, but it's going to be a small fraction of that $149 lifetime membership, with most users never paying anything at all.
If you can make one that is good enough that you don't need to advertise much, you might have a chance, but it's a very tough, very crowded market (for every Tinder and Bumble, there's are hundreds of dating sites which nobody remembers).