Here is my second part of my discussion of AFF’s Male to Female ratio.  If you have read the first post you might have gotten the idea that things look pretty grim out there for men hoping to find some action on AFF.  While this may be the case for those living outside of North America.  But for those living in the UK, USA or Canada if we look carefully at the numbers on AFF some interesting things start to emerge.

In the time I have spent on AFF I have noticed some interesting differences in how men and women interact on this site.  These patterns skew the M/F ratio to such a degree that they make those numbers a lot less meaningful or even irrelevant.  The two key differences that I have noted are as follows:

• Male members can be very sloppy with their profiles often abandoning them while Female members are much more careful with their profiles deleting or turning them off when they are finished with the site.
• Female members tend to be active for much shorter periods of time than Male members.

So why are Male members more sloppy and Female members are generally not?  Besides stating a fact of nature this phenomenon is clearly evident on AFF.  For example, with all the vast numbers of Men Seeking Women profiles, a large portion of them have not been logged into by their owners for months or even years.  Often these profiles have been abandoned by their owners because they have just given up.  AFF does not purge abandoned profiles from their listings and they include these profiles in their total member count just to keep the numbers high.  It is pretty common to come across Male member profiles that have not been active for some time.  For further confirmation of what I am describing let us refer to AFF’s official method of defining a member:

A “member” is a user account which has been logged in within approximately 2 years, has an available profile, and has an active email account

Clearly AFF is intent on counting member profiles that have not been used for up to two years.  I would call that counting abandoned profiles!  Part of AFF’s marketing strategy to sign up new members is to entice them with 30+ million profiles they have.  Too keep those numbers high, they need to include a lot abandoned profiles.  To AFF’s credit, the above definition can be found in the small print at the bottom of every AFF webpage.  Though I suspect most people do not really understand how it impacts AFF’s overall numbers.

So how many abandoned profiles are included in AFF’s member totals.  Firstly, I would define an abandoned profile as one that has not been logged into for three months or more.  Based on my searches of the AFF database (AFF does not make this task easy) I figure that anywhere between 50% to over 75% of the Male member profiles have been abandoned.  That adds up to a lot of phantom competition for any men hoping to hook up on AFF.

Women on the other hand are much less likely to abandon their profiles.  Women, who tend to be more careful about their online identity, are more likely to turn off their profile or delete them outright when they are not using it.  It is quite common to come across a link to a Female profile to then discover it has been either turned off or does not even exist anymore.

So what does this all mean?  Men who look at AFF’s horrible 10:1 M/F ratio may figure why bother?  But if you look carefully at the Male competition you will realise that most of them are not active and have abandoned their profiles.  Conversely, Female members are more likely to turn off or delete their profiles.  The combined effect of these two patterns drastically increases the number of male profiles and decreases the number of female profiles thus inflating the M/F ratio significantly.

The other factor that that skews the M/F ratio is the relative activity levels of Male and Female members.  It is very easy for a Female member to find a suitable match on AFF.  That should be hardly surprising!  In just a few weeks she can find all the fuck buddies she will ever need.  Once she has set up her speed dial with all her new friends she no longer needs AFF and as such turns off or deletes her profile.  Men on the other hand have to keep their profiles active for months or even years to gain any measure of success.  I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again on AFF.  Over the course of a year you will get thousands of Female members (in a given area) come and go but their numbers will not be reflected in the total member count because their profiles have been already deleted or turned off.

Let me illustrate this point further.  Let us say that you check the number of Women Seeking Men profiles in your city and find the total number is 12,000 listings.  That will be 12,000 listings today, but if you were to add in the number of deleted or turned off female profiles over the course of the year it might add up to 20,000 listings.

The combination of abandoned Male member profiles, deleted or turned off Female member profiles and the relative activity of male and female members has vastly inflated the numbers of male members and under estimated the number of female members.  If I were to guess on the percentage of active members (a member who has logged in during the past three months or less) as a percentage of the total quoted figures that AFF provides, it would probably be in the range of 10-20%.  The reason AFF continues in doing this slight of hand is so that inflated numbers keep the new member signups keep coming in.

In reality, the M/F ratio is not the 10:1 or 15:1 that I talked about in my last post.  It might be 5:1 or even better but AFF’s search engine does not provide me with enough traction to put a definite number to it.  This news should be encouraging to those men who are hoping to hook up.  With some persistence and patience there are some good chances for success for men on this site.  However, there are a lot of things that many of the male members do to completely rule themselves out of contention.  But that discussion will be for another day.