How Many People Use OkCupid?

OkCupid says millions of people use it around the world, and it does not publish an exact count. That is the honest answer. Anyone quoting a precise user number for OkCupid is either guessing or repeating someone else's guess.

OkCupid describes itself as an online dating app with millions of users around the world. It says it is available in over 180 countries, on the app, on mobile web and on desktop.

It also says it is responsible for nearly 200 million matches around the world every year, and that it was the first free online dating site. Those are the company's own statements, and they are worth reading as marketing, not as an audit.

A match count of that size tells you the app is used heavily. It does not tell you how many different people are behind it, how many are active this month, or how many are men and how many are women.

There is no worldwide count of active users on its help pages. There is no split by gender, and no breakdown by country.

The one number it does give comes from a legal disclosure for the European Union. There, OkCupid says its average monthly active recipients in the EU are well below the 45 million threshold for a very large online platform. That is a regulatory line, not a user count. It only tells you the European number is a lot smaller than that line.

So you can say "millions" and stop. Any more precise figure comes from outside the company.

A man in a city of two million does not date the world. He dates the women within an hour of his front door.

OkCupid filters by distance, and it says most members look only for people near them. A number that sounds large for the whole app can still leave you with a short list where you live. A smaller app can feel full in a city that happens to be well covered.

That is why the better question is the local one. How many women near me are on it, and how many of those would I want to meet?

You can get a fair answer in ten minutes, and it will beat any statistic.

Set your location correctly and open Discover. Go through the cards and count the women you would be glad to match with. Do it again with a wider distance, but only as wide as you would honestly travel.

If you find plenty of suitable women in range, the local pool is healthy. If you run out in minutes and the same faces return, the pool is small, and you should add a second app rather than wait for OkCupid to fill.

Try it at a couple of times of day, too. A pool that looks thin at noon may look different on an evening.

Even a big pool does not decide your outcome. The man who gets dates on a quiet app usually has the better photos and the better first message.

coach, who teaches online dating, treats the whole thing as a numbers game with a series of ratios, and he notes that most men fixate on the wrong number. The size of the app is the number you cannot change. The number you can change is the fraction of women who Like you back, and the fraction of those who reply.

If the local pool is modest, it can still carry a good month, provided you treat each woman properly. If it is huge, it is easy to become careless, and a man who treats every card as replaceable ends up with a pile of matches and no conversations.

Use the "millions" line when somebody asks. Use your own ten minute count when you are deciding where to spend your time.

If the count is good, work OkCupid properly: good photos, written answers, and a first message that refers to something on her page. If it is poor, treat OkCupid as one of two or three places you look, and let the other apps cover the gap.