300,000 Tinder Swipes In One Chart

Users End Up Talking To Less Than 1% Of The Profiles They Swipe On

People sign up for dating apps for all sorts of reasons: to find love, to hook-up, to have something to do while you pee. Yet despite different motives, most dating app users probably have at least one thing in common: they're quick to swipe. In fact, Tinder users take an average of 3-7 seconds to decide on a suitor and swipe left or right.¹On Tinder, swiping right on a profile means you "like" them and want to match with them. Swiping left means you are not interested in matching.

Something motivating this incredibly fast judgement is the fact that there’s always another (potentially better!) profile waiting in line. Dating apps give seemingly infinite options, so if you’re not into the woman with her dog or the man who refuses to look straight into the camera, why not swipe left and see who’s behind door #2?

In other words, it isn’t always easy putting yourself out there - even with the help of an app. Any tinder user probably questions their “strategy” at one point or another: am I swiping right enough to even have any options? Are my age restrictions too narrow? Why won’t that cute guy message me back??

When Oliver and I realized we could access our Tinder data, we immediately jumped on the opportunity to answer these questions and see our “performance.” So without further ado, here are the ones who got away (all 3,409 of them, to be exact):

Katie's Tinder Stats

Instead of finding "the one," I was lucky enough to find 52%. That is, 52% of the guys I swiped right on also swiped right on me. Of those matches, I only ended up talking to about half of them. And for those lucky few, how long did our conversations last? Well, I sent about 4 messages to each match, on average. From there, the spark inevitably fizzled out or we moved to texting. Did I find love? 🤷 Did I make a fun graph? ✔️✔️✔️

So how do these numbers compare to others in this game of “to swipe right or not to swipe right?” Am I getting significantly more or fewer matches than my friends? How long do most matches talk before one realizes the other is - as it turns out - not “the world’s biggest The Office fan?”

Oliver and I don’t work at Tinder nor do we have access to large amounts of their data, so we can’t fully answer these questions. We do, however, have friends and somehow convinced them to send us their data. In total, we assembled a sample of six men and six women. If it isn’t immediately obvious, we’re not planning on publishing the following results in any scientific journals; our sample is both small and heavily biased (all participants are young, college educated, interested in the opposite sex, brave enough to trust us with their Tinder data, etc). In other words, chances are the following stats aren’t representative of your dating app experience, but it’s a start in establishing a baseline you can compare your own reality to.

286,477 Swipes From 12 Tinder Users

Of all the profiles someone sees, how many do they actually end up liking, matching with, and talking to? The answer is astoundingly few. One individual swiped through nearly 23,000 profiles, and only ended up talking to about 1,000 of them. That’s a rate of just 4%, which is actually the highest out of the sample - most of our friends ended up speaking to less than 1% of the profiles they came across.

We also noticed some metrics differ significantly between men and women:

Evidently men and women have very different approaches when it comes to using dating apps. While this is just a small survey of our friends, more rigorous studies have also found that men tend to cast wider nets into the dating pool, while women are more selective in their right swipes. In our case, we found women have a much higher match rate than men (54% vs 5%), although comparing number of matches to total swipes produces low rates for both groups (4% for women, 2% for men).

Although what happens after matching isn’t particularly gendered: men send at least one message to 44% of their matches, while women message about 39% of theirs. Out of all profiles they ever see, men end up speaking to than 1%, while women talk to almost 2%. And what do we know about those conversations?

Tinder Conversations Don't Last Very Long

So an average 20-something, college-educated midwesterner will match and message with about 1% of the profiles they come across. What happens next between said Tinder user and their matches is less obvious, but there is one clue in the data: in addition to swipe stats, Tinder lets users download every single message they’ve ever sent through their app (don’t worry, we didn’t read our friends’ messages...chances are the majority just say “hey” and “u up?” anyway). We did, however, look into how many messages were sent to the average match and how much time typically passes between a conversation's first and last messages.

Basically, most conversations last about one day and consist of around 10 messages. After that, either someone gets bored or the conversation moves to another medium. Regardless, you don’t have very long to make your impression.

Conclusion

While writing this, I’m sitting alone on my couch and the closest thing I have to a boyfriend is the nearly empty jar of Trader Joe's salsa I'm eating. Five months on Tinder didn't get me what the app promises, but it provided plenty of entertainment and data. At the end of the day, isn't that basically what a significant other is for? No? Okay…

Dating is never going to be easy, with or without technology, but Tinder does offer one advantage: it exposes you to hordes of people. Each of our friends swiped an average of 13,900 times, so even if they only chat with someone 2% of the time, they're still getting an opportunity with almost 300 people they probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. At the end of the day, this (theoretically) gives them more conversations and more dates...and more time wondering if they’re being catfished.

As for me? Maybe my 152 matches ended up not working out, but hey, there's always Hinge.