How Many Users Does Zoosk Have?

Zoosk's official site says it connects over 40 million singles worldwide. That is the number Zoosk gives for itself, and it is a worldwide total, not a count of the women who are active near you this week. How many Zoosk users there are matters far less than how many are within a short drive of your home and could become matches who message you back.

Forty million is a big figure, and it comes from the company that runs the service. It is a claim about reach across every country, so a man in a mid-sized town cannot use it to predict anything about his own matches.

A worldwide total also says nothing about when anyone last logged in. A man needs the opposite figure: women within his area who opened the app this month. Zoosk's number does not give you that, and no honest article can fill it in for your town.

Two things decide whether Zoosk works for you. The first is how many women live close enough to meet. The second is how many of them are active. Both vary from one city to the next, and both show up in the first hour of use.

You can read them for free, because browsing costs nothing on a free account. Open the app, set your distance to something you would really travel, and look at who comes up.

Spend an hour on this before you pay for anything. Zoosk's Carousel lets you answer yes, no or maybe on one person at a time, so you can keep a tally as you go.

• How many women in your age range come up before the same faces start repeating?
• How many of them have clear, recent-looking photos and a filled-in profile?
• How many are women you would be glad to meet for a drink?

Write the third number down. If you get through a long evening and only a handful pass, the app is thin where you live. If you keep finding women you like, you have found a place worth a month of effort. Either result is useful, and you learned it without spending a cent.

a dating coach treats online dating as a numbers game that is very winnable. He breaks it into a chain of ratios. How many matches you get for the time you put in. How many of those are women you want. How many answer, how many give you a number, and how many become dates. A big pool helps only the first step. It cannot fix the rest.

A man with a modest pool and strong photos and a good first line will out-date a man with a huge pool and a weak opener. So when you see a large figure, resist the idea that more users means more dates. What counts is how many of your matches reply, and what you do when they do.

Zoosk says it uses behavioral matchmaking technology: when you like someone, the site takes note and uses that to find your best matches. It also describes SmartPick, which sends daily matches tailored to your preferences and interests, and Carousel, where you swipe yes, no or maybe.

That has a practical consequence. Your choices teach the app what to show you next. If you say yes to everyone, it learns very little about your taste. My view of auto-swiping on most apps is that the algorithm is against you when you do it, because it reads indiscriminate approval as a signal about you. A man who answers honestly, and passes on women he would not meet, gets a cleaner stream of people to look at.

If the census turns up enough women worth writing to, your next job is messaging, which is where most of the results are decided.

Send short first lines that give her something to answer. My method moves from a first line to an exchange of numbers in roughly four to seven short texts, so aim your early messages at a plan and not a long chat. Count your results after a week: how many women you wrote to, how many wrote back, and how many agreed to meet. Those three numbers tell you more about Zoosk than any figure on its website.

A thin pool is not a verdict on you. It is a fact about one app in one place. If the census disappoints, spend your effort on a different app where your area is busier, and take your improved photos and first lines with you, since they work everywhere.

Do not pay for Zoosk to fix a thin pool. A paid membership gives you more ways to message the women who are there. It cannot add women to a town that has few of them. If you are unsure which app suits where you live, a coach can look at your photos and your conversations and tell you where the weak step is.