- Words by Inquiro
Cuffing season is a period of time when people look for short or long term relationship to pass the colder months of the year. It spans between October and around Valentines day. The word cuff (from ‘handcuff’) is rooted on the idea of being tied down – in a relationship.
Considering the Philippines is not necessarily a cold country, do we have a cuffing season?
Using data and numbers from online dating apps such Bumble and Tinder, trends and insights were investigated.
With over a million data subjects between June and December 2022 as sample, here’s what we’ve found.
The observed online dating app users skyrocketed by the end of the year, with a 2.3% increase from November to December. June saw the lowest number of data subjects using dating apps.
This increase in users during the later part of the year can be an indicator of the existence of a cuffing season here in the Philippines.
Based on our recent poll on social media, it turns out that people tend to think that men are on dating apps more than women. But is that really true?
Tracking Inquiro’s data over time, here’s what we found
We can see that males are consistently more likely to be in dating apps between June and December 2022. Men also saw a higher increase between November and December at +2.5% (only 2% increase for women). This suggests that men are feeling the cuffing season more than women do.
Now let’s take a look at cities in Metro Manila.
Makati, Mandaluyong, and Taguig are the top 3 cities when it comes to percentage of their citizens dating around. All of these cities are well above the average in the Philippines (3.2%), with Makati and Mandaluyong almost triple the average during December.
An increase in users across all cities was observed during the end of the year, another indicator of the existence of cuffing season.
When we take the average per city (between June and December 2022.) We can rank the cities as shown below.
Now that we’ve shown the trends in the number of those dating around. Let’s try to investigate the activity of these love seekers. Mobile data usage is a pretty good measure on how active are these individuals on these dating apps.
On average, an active online dating app user in July spends around 170 MB of mobile data on dating apps. That number increased 4 times by the end of the year at 730 MB.
These figures together paint a clear picture for cuffing season in the Philippines. The next step is to observe if the same phenomena persist on a year to year basis. For now, we saw plenty of evidence for cuffing season and interesting insights in the world of online dating.
This blog will be updated to keep track of monthly changes.
This blog is part of a series ‘By the number’ – using Inquiro data to provide insights on mainstream phenomena. In case you missed it, the first entry is By The Numbers | Korean content consumers.
Interested to uncover new insights about the market? Get in touch with us today and let’s see what we can discover together. Email us at info@inquiro.ph.
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