Bloggasm

A study found that females receive more than twice as many responses as males, and responses to female posts contain a significantly higher amount of relevant information.

It was widely reported recently that according to a recent report, the free classifieds site Craigslist is estimated to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2009. Most articles on the story noted that the site has significantly hurt the paid classifieds sections of newspapers because they can’t compete with Craigslist’s free ads.

But if an ad is free does that necessarily mean you will get a high quality or quantity of response? Is it possible that the free nature of the ads creates a high noise ratio that dilutes the ad’s effectiveness? To attempt to answer these questions I targeted one section of the classifieds site in which I could create several quantifiable measurements to measure the quality of the response: the dating section.

I created fake ads for straight female and males in three different cities: DC, New York and LA. All the ads for each gender were almost completely identical, with slight variations. They listed the age of the person (late 20s), the education level, and a few hobbies. The ads did not include a picture.

Once posted, I waited until each of the ads dropped off the front page of the listing (which took a little over 24 hours for most) and then reviewed all the emails. I scored the number of responses, whether they included a picture, whether they included contact info outside of email, whether they included career/education info, and whether they listed the age of the respondent.

I found that not only did females receive more than twice the number of responses (44 total compared to 21), but the quality of the response was much higher. About 47% of the responses to the female’s ad included pictures, and more than 60% included the respondent’s age. In contrast, the responses to the male ads contained hardly any information at all, and most were blatant dating website and adult services spam.

The ads I put up were mostly generic and including more information might have yielded varying results, but the study showed that all things being equal, the females will receive much higher quality and quantity of responses.

This is just one section of the site, so it would be interesting to continue on with this experiment in other sections, and then compare the number and quality of the responses that one would receive in the city dailies. Is it possible that a paid advertisement would be more effective?

Complete results from my study below:

DC Straight Female:

# of responses to ad:20
# of responses that included a picture:11 (55%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email:2 (10%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 13 (65%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 15 (75%)

DC Straight Male:

# of responses to ad:9
# of responses that included a picture:1 (11%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info:0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 3 (33%)

NY Straight Female:

# of responses to ad:19
# of responses that included a picture: 8 (42%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 4 (21%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 8 (42%)

NY Straight Male:

# of responses to ad: 7
# of responses that included a picture: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info:0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 2 (0%)

LA Straight Female:

# of responses to ad: 5
# of responses that included a picture: 2 (40%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 3 (60%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 4 (80%)

LA Straight Male:

# of responses to ad: 5
# of responses that included a picture: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included contact info other than email: 0 (0%)
# of responses that included career/education info: 0 (0%)
# of responses the specified age of the person: 1 (0%)

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