Report Shows More People Of All Ages Are Dating Online
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Loading... - Tristan Lahm
- 08 Apr 2020
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The Internet has changed the way people can get what they want in profound and ever-evolving ways. It started with scientists getting information from each other on the ARPANET. Then came the World Wide Web and everything changed. Now we can get almost anything that ships in a box, digital entertainment like music and movies, places to stay with Airbnb, and Uber rides to wherever we want to go. With online dating sites and mobile dating apps we can even get someone to spend time with after Uber drops us off. It started with a small group of scientists and now it’s . . . who? Who uses online dating services? Pew Research answered this question with a report on the demographics of online dating in the United States.
The graph compares survey data gathered by Pew in June and July of 2015 with data Pew gathered from a similar survey conducted in 2013. As can be seen in the graph, online dating appears to have increased for almost every age group over the past two years. Care must be taken when reading the graph, however, because several of the apparent increases may fall within the combined margins of error of the two surveys. Of course, some of the increases for particular age groups may in fact be larger than they appear in the graph for the same reason.
The overall trend is clear. Online dating is well - established, it appears to be growing, and it is being used by people of all ages. Collapsing across all age groups, online dating has increased by approximately 36% in only two years. It’s also both clear and unsurprising that millennials (ages 18 to 34) are making more use of online dating services than their parents and grandparents.
A striking feature of this data is how different younger millennials (those aged 18 to 24) are from everyone else. Not only are these young adults most likely to make use of online dating services, their increase in interest in online dating from 2013 to 2015 dwarfs that of all the other groups. Younger millennials are also the only group in the survey that favored mobile apps over online dating sites even though they also used online dating sites more than any other group. The younger millennials preference for mobile apps coincides with data from a different Pew survey that indicates younger millennials are more likely to own a smartphone than any other age group.
