We Experiment On Human Beings!

July 28th, 2014 by Christian Rudder

I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out. Like this young buck, trying to get a potato to cry.


We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

Here are a few of the more interesting experiments OkCupid has run.

Experiment 1: LOVE IS BLIND, OR SHOULD BE

OkCupid’s ten-year history has been the epitome of the old saying: two steps forward, one total fiasco. A while ago, we had the genius idea of an app that set up blind dates; we spent a year and a half on it, and it was gone from the app store in six months.

Of course, being geniuses, we chose to celebrate the app’s release by removing all the pictures from OkCupid on launch day. “Love Is Blind Day” on OkCupid—January 15, 2013.

All our site metrics were way down during the “celebration”, for example:



But by comparing Love Is Blind Day to a normal Tuesday, we learned some very interesting things. In those 7 hours without photos:

And it wasn’t that “looks weren’t important” to the users who’d chosen to stick around. When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in the middle of conversations that had started “blind”. Those conversations melted away. The goodness was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.



This whole episode made me curious, so I went and looked up the data for the people who had actually used the blind date app. I found a similar thing: once they got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how good-looking their partner was. Here’s the female side of the experience (the male is very similar).



Oddly, it appears that having a better-looking blind date made women slightly less happy—my operating theory is that hotter guys were assholes more often. Anyhow, the fascinating thing is the online reaction of those exact same women was just as judgmental as everyone else’s:



Basically, people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.

Experiment 2: SO WHAT’S A PICTURE WORTH?

All dating sites let users rate profiles, and OkCupid’s original system gave people two separate scales for judging each other, “personality” and “looks.”
I found this old screenshot. The “loading” icon over the picture pretty much sums up our first four years. Anyhow, here’s the vote system:



Our thinking was that a person might not be classically gorgeous or handsome but could still be cool, and we wanted to recognize that, which just goes to show that when OkCupid started out, the only thing with more bugs than our HTML was our understanding of human nature.

Here’s some data I dug up from the backup tapes. Each dot here is a person. The two scores are within a half point of each other for 92% of the sample after just 25 votes (and that percentage approaches 100% as vote totals get higher).

In short, according to our users, “looks” and “personality” were the same thing, which of course makes perfect sense because, you know, this young female account holder, with a 99th percentile personality:



…and whose profile, by the way, contained no text, is just so obviously a really cool person to hang out and talk to and clutch driftwood with.

After we got rid of the two scales, and replaced it with just one, we ran a direct experiment to confirm our hunch—that people just look at the picture. We took a small sample of users and half the time we showed them, we hid their profile text. That generated two independent sets of scores for each profile, one score for “the picture and the text together” and one for “the picture alone.” Here’s how they compare. Again, each dot is a user. Essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you.



So, your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.

Experiment 3: THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

The ultimate question at OkCupid is, does this thing even work? By all our internal measures, the “match percentage” we calculate for users is very good at predicting relationships. It correlates with message success, conversation length, whether people actually exchange contact information, and so on. But in the back of our minds, there’s always been the possibility: maybe it works just because we tell people it does. Maybe people just like each other because they think they’re supposed to? Like how Jay-Z still sells albums?

† Once the experiment was concluded, the users were notified of the correct match percentage.

To test this, we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)† Not surprisingly, the users sent more first messages when we said they were compatible. After all, that’s what the site teaches you to do.



But we took the analysis one step deeper. We asked: does the displayed match percentage cause more than just that first message—does the mere suggestion cause people to actually like each other? As far as we can measure, yes, it does.

When we tell people they are a good match, they act as if they are. Even when they should be wrong for each other.



The four-message threshold is our internal measure for a real conversation. And though the data is noisier, this same “higher display means more success” pattern seems to hold when you look at contact information exchanges, too.

This got us worried—maybe our matching algorithm was just garbage and it’s only the power of suggestion that brings people together. So we tested things the other way, too: we told people who were actually good for each other, that they were bad, and watched what happened.

Here’s the whole scope of results (I’m using the odds of exchanging four messages number here):



As you can see, the ideal situation is the lower right: to both be told you’re a good match, and at the same time actually be one. OkCupid definitely works, but that’s not the whole story. And if you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of compatibility works just as well as the truth. Thus the career of someone like Doctor Oz, in a nutshell. And, of course, to some degree, mine.

1,220 Responses to “We Experiment On Human Beings!”

  1. Steve says:

    Looks are just the easiest and quickest quality to critique. It doesn’t mean other things aren’t important (even more important), it just means I can assess someone’s looks in 5-10 seconds, whereas the text only provides a tiny peek into who they are. In both cases, we are looking for deal-breakers; Unless you’re just looking for a one-night (ie. 30 minute) stand, SOME of the text is important. Better to say nothing at all than to say you’re a racist heroin user that punches kittens. But that just means that you’ll get 1 date until the person finds out what you’re really like, and then they will split, no matter how good looking you are. So yes looks are not the most important, it’s just that it can take YEARS to really know someone inside, but their outside is quick and easy to judge.

  2. Skyguy says:

    How curious! Thanks for sharing.
    My high school science fair project was an assessment of 300 peoples persona preference in their partners. I gave each participant a questionnaire that detailed what they thought of as the most attractive mate.

    It was a lot of fun. I did a second study which had multiple observers track the gate (how someone walks) of multiple people. I tested the participants and the observers to find out if you could determine someones personality from how their feet connect to the ground. Our non-verbal communication is seriously 93% of our ability to communicate.

    I consider your test regarding the pics w/ or w/o text similar to my tests. People are typically visual. Personally I love to read and write, so what you look like usually comes next.

    Thanks for bringing back the oktrends! I look forward to following :)

  3. Dan says:

    Brilliant – I wonder, do the results of experiment #2 hold equally true for both genders? It doesn’t seem at all farfetched to me that women would give more attention to text while men overwhelmingly message anyone they find hot.

  4. Guest says:

    So one big article that sums up the two sentences I’ve heard related to online dating for years:
    A)Be attractive.
    B)Don’t be unattractive.

  5. TTW says:

    I really found this blog post fascinating, but I have to add I think it depends on where in the world you are using okcupid. I haven’t had a profile pic up of myself, and I live and work in the Middle East. Not having that pic isn’t a problem, and I’m frequently surprised at how many people get in contact with me despite it!

  6. TheSquirt says:

    Since the majority of your members are foreign scammers, the blind date thing was bound to be a failure. Pictures are one sure way to tell if they are scammers… the other is their english. But when people like me stand up to the scammers, we get kicked off. So you really do want the shallow, stupid people. Your site is crap and so are you for allowing this nonsense to exist.

  7. Steve says:

    Whatever, guys. Another idiot internet dating site shoots itself in the foot, and I’m gonna enjoy watching you go down in flames.

  8. At says:

    OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing.
    Per your own blog post, apparently this is true.

    Neither does any other website.
    Per my experience, and the experience of so many other ‘Human Beings!’, this is definitely false, idiotic, obtuse, … you choose your adjective that means ‘completely out of the loop.’

    Oh, wait… am I commenting on a spoof of your OK Cupid website blog? If so, my apologies.

    If not, well, you are just, … idiots?

  9. Iambic Pentameter says:

    Wow, I love this! Bravo to you guys, both for conducting research in the name of ‘seeing how good you really are’ and also poking holes in the system, and for having the cojones to admit it unabashedly. I’m not at all surprised by your results, I have found online dating to be probably the shallowest form of meeting people and extremely difficult to generate relationships, and I’m at the absolute WORST an average to above average looking guy. In fact, when I go out in the real world, I have no trouble meeting women and setting up dates, as opposed to online where it was a damn chore just to get responses, let alone set up a date with someone. I realize there is a big difference between what men & women experience in online dating, but from what I can tell, in person not only is personality really shining through and IMO, making someone look better then they would if they were just a 2-dimensional photo on a computer screen, but women (and maybe men) will not be so quick to dismiss / discount a potential guy as they are online. I’m not at all surprised by your findings that people who actually made it to a blind-date had a good time regardless of how attractive they found the other person. That has been my experience as well (as a guy) who just knows how to have a good time, even if I may not be physically attracted to someone. Your line “people are as shallow as the technology lets them be” basically says it all.

  10. Michael says:

    Knowing that OkCupid’s administrators could have just lied about the match percentages after I spent all that time answering the questions only furthers my belief that the people who have found lasting relationships on this site (myself included) were able to do so despite OkCupid, rather than because of it.

  11. Ba says:

    You ought to leave the match percentage hidden between two people until a first message is sent and the ice is broken. People might be more inclined to interact, if anything just to see that number… or at the very least, they won’t be put off by a low match score.

  12. at says:

    Oh, wait … you actually were trying to provide some type of online … service, AND you decided to do some kind of odd weird [pick your own adjective] marketing experiment. About your service?
    Sure, ‘Journalists, please write press@okcupid.com for more information.’
    Meaningless, to be sure. However, it will be … information.
    So sad how society has devolved into little pathetic experiments and memes like ‘okcupid did this and found out maybe this, or that’.
    Sad.

  13. Gaulwa says:

    Awesome, thanks for sharing these data.

  14. Dr. Fil says:

    People are getting so mad at this hahaha. Attractive people already knew looks were everything in the dating game, it’s just ugly people that are complaining because everyone lies to them saying how personality is more important. It’s not. Looks are just about everything.

  15. FancyPants says:

    So, so, so so happy to see a blog post from you. I’ve kept subscribed to your RSS feed purely because of the foolishness that young love blinds us with. Ever since I first saw you, I’ve hung on every little informative word, and every interesting sentence that form from them. I’ve yearned for your data and graphs, to read about your algorithms and outside the box thinking for……5 years now??

    5 years, OkCupid. Now I’m pissed. Don’t make me wait even 5 days for the next post, or we’re through. Young love is over.

    -Jonnifer

  16. Bish says:

    An actual 90% match, displayed 30% has 16% chance of conversation.
    An actual 30% match, displayed 90% has a 17% chance of conversation.

    So people believe your algorithm more than their own intuition. Even though your earlier experiments seem to show that your algorithm is a load of crap. So, two thoughts:
    1) will people continue to use your service now you’ve admitted it’s all hogwash?
    2) how exactly does this show that experiments are a good thing? You manipulated a bunch of unsuspecting folks, making them invest time and effort (and possibly money) in getting to know random other people, and concluded that you don’t really know what you’re doing.

    Well done, this is clearly a big win for science.

  17. K says:

    Hunh! It’s different, though. On OkCupid, we take tests all the time. If you read your end user license agreement, it says that you are going to be doing testing. Facebook came into existence years ago, and the EULA many folks read back then has been changing whenever Facebook wants it to change. We trust (or at least expect) you to test us, we give you less information. We gave more information to Facebook, and we don’t trust Facebook to do anything, right now.

  18. Larry says:

    Here’s what I’m curious about: How do you know when contact details are shared?

  19. Andrew says:

    I’m torn. It’s interesting data, though the results are somewhat unsurprising if you’re into these kinds of social studies. Brings out the geek in me.

    But now how do I trust that OKC is playing by its own rules? I try to give my match percentages a lot of leeway as it is based on dating experiences from here, but still, how do I interpret what’s being presented to me on my screen? “I’m not even mad” – just confused about how and when I’m supposed to put stock in the service offered here. As silly as it feels to decide who to date based on an algorithm.

    But ultimately you’re probably right in your argument that everyone does it, so why not. Businesses want to understand their customers better, so they’ll do whatever is within legal bounds until they’re told by someone to stop. I know I shouldn’t be surprised; that’s the embarrassing, naive part.

    Keep up the good work? I’ll get back in line now and return to your service; please don’t take it from me.

  20. Misanthrope says:

    I must admit that I liked the post. It has some interesting thoughts. It doesn’t make any outrageous claims like Facebook’s study did (well, implied). It’s funny. Still, the timing of the post left me with a feeling that Mr. Rudder is trying to ride the “recycled scandal wave” created by Facebook last month. That might be a smart marketing move, but its “coolness” is kind of questionable.
    http://1stopit.blogspot.com/2014/07/okcupid-this-caviar-has-been-eaten.html

  21. sfchris says:

    I have many times had a low percentage match with someone for which I had high sectional percentages (eg ethics, dating etc).

    And vice versa.

    This never happened before about 2010 or so. I find that my overall match percentage is no longer reliable because of this. Did the match % formula get wildly changed around the time of the match.com acquisition?

  22. Sean says:

    The ability to see the other person’s answers makes it so you can change your answers accordingly to make sure you’re a “perfect” match to them. Being able to change your answers every 24 hours sort of throws out the idea that what you put down as an answer is what you truly believe to begin with.

  23. VonK says:

    I don’t know… whatever you do in your experiments, I feel the result is always the same: OKCupid is just not working (for me at least), but it’s the same with every dating sites I suppose.

    The four-message threshold is a rarity for me, what’s not is the zero-reply routine. Heard of that one? And the girls are unforgiving, one little mistake, and zap! they won’t reply anymore; eventually they delete their account. Have you noticed how all good-looking girls end up deleting/hiding their accounts? They get too many messages surely but oh the frustration!

    There was that girl I found in the US, good match and all, she knocked me off my feet. I sent her a few lines and she did reply likewise, with a conversational question. I sent a reply in turn, probably too long, and a second. She never replied after that. I tried and tried but nothing. Now she deleted her account (I wasn’t writing anymore and she had probably blocked me anyway). Now I will never know what I did that put her off and I will be forever wondering in vain what my mistake had been. This is painful. I still would have wanted to discuss, I feel this, the conversation, should have gone further.

    But you’re right on one thing: it’s probably all in the pictures. And I can’t blame the other party because I’m exactly like that too. Fair enough.

  24. Peter says:

    I think experiments are great because they allow you to improve things helping more people find the right match. I would say of all the sites I have tried none have brought more success then okcupid. I even pay money for this site now and it is very reasonable compared to others I have tried. I think love is a very complex thing and despite all the best calculations it is hard to know what really brings two people together. It is only a matter of time though till the right person comes into my life.

  25. Cavalary says:

    *poke* There’s still a bug in your post, you forgot an end tag sign for the span for the bit set not to display.

    Otherwise, still saying what I have at the top of my profile: Looking/waiting for a site like OKC used to be around 2005 (plus the added public answers and question adding, those were just about the only good changes since, though that 2nd one seems to have been taken back lately as well), and for the type of user it tended to attract at the time.

  26. sensibleparadox says:

    I have to take issue with the dismissal of the outrage at Facebook’s revelation of performing experiments. Facebook users were outraged when Facebook revealed that they had subjected users to *psychological* experiments to see if it was possible to control/manipulate it’s audiences mood based on filtering content, without the informed consent of the subjects of the experiment.

    Please tell me you can see what’s wrong with that without me having to explain it to you.

    Really? OK, then. I’ll spell it out:

    1) People do not want to have the content they read filtered.
    2) People do not want to have their mood manipulated.
    3) People do not want to be subjected to psychological experimentation without their knowledge or informed consent.

    Experimenting with your web site *is* normal, and to be expected. The goal of that sort of experimentation is to figure out what changes to the web site will make the site better for its users, or bring in more traffic/revenue. It’s not to see whether it’s possible to change people’s outlook by skewing the content that you choose to serve to them. Don’t ever mistake the right to play around with the design of the site with the right to play around with people’s lives.

  27. Terrence says:

    I have been saying this for years. This is nothing new. Your picture means everything. Forget about people helping you spruce up your profile. Guys, don’t listen to any advice women have to say because it’s all crap. All that matters in online dating is that you look good enough for someone to brag about. If not your chances of finding a date are slim at best. And guys, this goes for the women you think are attainable also. You will have a better time going to meetup.com and finding some groups that get you out of the house and doing something. There was a girl on reddit who said that she tried Tinder and she liked it but hated how it made her choose someone just based on looks, when she knew that a lot of those left swipes were guys she would have talked to in a bar or some other setting.

  28. gerusz says:

    The blog is back! Yay!

    Can we expect more posts in the near future?

  29. Grub says:

    Before you were bought out, you used untouched data to point out enlightening information for users and the public. Now… You just manipulate both your users AND the very data that they use the site for.

    Your algorithm while imperfect was at least the most innovative on the market. But changing match percentages is just low and completely undermines why people liked the site.

    Bottom line, you’re assholes.

  30. The_Life_I_Love says:

    It is a well known psychological facts that looks influences the way we perceived others. To such an extent that in court, a handsome criminal is more likely to be found innocent that an ugly one. There’s a lot of research done on this.

  31. Bryan says:

    I love the fact that y’all do research like this. OkTrends is the main reason (aside from free) that I signed up for OkC and I’ve actually been really sad that there haven’t been any posts lately.

    Keep up the good work! I enjoy reading your findings!

  32. Anthony says:

    I’ve been with OKC for going on 6 years now (cuz I’m poly not a loser) and have always been fascinated with the different changes of the site. I’m not really surprised with this data. Heck, I’m fairly sure I’ve fallen into the “shallow” part of the dataset on occasion. Have you all considered implementing a debrief survey to see how successful someone has been with a specific match? As in, going beyond the matchmaking process & see if some relationship goal (marriage, sex, commitment, etc.) was reached?

  33. Bo says:

    How long have you been on OKC? It used to be so fun, and rather reliable. I’ll never forget being excited when I saw 800 people online at one time! *gasp*.

    When OKC allowed “Zero” personality profiles…. it slipped into sh*tdome. Still, I’m on it. Just have to tighten my parameters more, because OKC has none.

    Y’all had a good thing at one time. I thought you could glean a hell of a lot of pertinent info from your formulas and truth. Appears I was wrong. Cheating and manipulation are the easy way out for this generation. Sadly.

  34. el-fin says:

    you’ve just solved a puzzle for me. I stared at some folks profiles, a while back, and scratched my head a lot: how could this person have such a match score when the questions (I’m an avid answer reader, you see – and my profile even incites people to answer the questions)… the agreement of question responses had nothing in common with the match score. Honestly, I can’t remember what I did when I discovered this. But one thing is for sure, they’re all water under the bridge now. thanks for keeping this site going and adding these quirks. dating site with easter eggs.

  35. Ben says:

    Who made that guinea pig graphic? It looks like ms paint. Fire them now ask questions later.

  36. Bo says:

    I also remember when OKC had free video chat….. *sigh*

    I have been highly successful on this site, with friends I’ve met f2f, going back now, 9 years. Dating a guy now, whom I met online elsewhere, but when his profile suddenly appeared to me on OKC, “We think you might like this person…”, I definitely changed the tune in my chatter and asked him out – we really must meet now…” We’ve been dating over 2 years.

    Online dating is what you make it – armed with what you know, and basic common sense. The old adage “if it seems, smells, looks, sounds too good to be true..” applies online as well. OKC will manipulate data. However, they tossed out many golden parameters a long time ago….

    As I posted elsewhere today:

    ” I weigh their perception with my own judgement, and I have never been wrong – however, OKC has been wrong – now I see why. Still, I’ll add their algorithms to my own intuition and bat 100% correct, every time. I have long-term friends
    from this site… going back 9 years. OKC, like every thing else, is
    what you make it – armed with knowledge of how they run it.

    Have a bad experience with online dating? No different than not liking a salad at Fresh Choice….

    YOU MADE IT!”

  37. MJ says:

    So your defense is, “Everybody does it, so it’s perfectly okay”? Nice.

  38. Nadif says:

    JESUS F. CHRIST YOU’RE BACK!

  39. friskis says:

    Why is some user main page “overall match” value so optimistic (and high, at least in my case) compared with the detailed and separated match values you can find on your “the two of us” tab?

    Lately I only look into the latter, as is the one really working for me.

    How come, just 30 intersecting questions yield a 95% match value on the main page? That’s just useless (!!).

  40. JWilly48519 says:

    So: does an average-looking guy quantitatively help or hurt his appeal (a) by having ten pictures up, and (b) by having a very extensive profile?

  41. TheJenny says:

    Would it be too much to ask for you to run statistics on your numbers? While the numbers themselves are fascinating, It would be nice to be able to attach significance to them. For example, is the 20% datapoint in the final figure significantly different from the rest of the datapoints?

  42. DrTJEckleburg says:

    Have you ever heard of informed consent?

  43. thisisjimmy says:

    I don’t know why people are so upset. Data was manipulated and gathered – a site that focuses in gigantic amounts of data needs to do this to get better. If you’re on a site that is free to join then you should expect that you are paying with your data, among other things (ads). I’m glad they’re being honest about it, and I welcome more of their findings on this blog.

    Also, if you’re criticizing their self-admitted inability to understand fully how to match people, do you understand how complex and varied people are? How stupid, vain, caring, loving, generous, awful, selfish, selfless, amazing and disgusting they can be? It ain’t easy parsing that.

  44. DBA says:

    So what’s the chi^2 for that contingency table? I’d also like to see odds ratios with confidence intervals.

  45. genmaichaperson says:

    Personally I give the utmost importance to profile pictures. But what I am assessing is not just “looks.”

    I am looking at how people choose to present themselves, what kind of environment, interests and friends they have. Their aesthetic sense, their facial expressions. Selfies are always a terrible sign. Bathroom selfies are catastrophic.

    I have zero interest in “beauty.” But after years of couch surfing and okcupiding I can usually predict if I am going to find the text of a profile engaging just by looking at profile pictures. There is a lot of information there to a discerning observer.

  46. Cady says:

    “Knowing that OkCupid’s administrators could have just lied about the match percentages after I spent all that time answering the questions only furthers my belief that the people who have found lasting relationships on this site (myself included) were able to do so despite OkCupid, rather than because of it.”

    By Michael ^.

    Pretty much sums it up. Your percentages may have been a lie, may have been truth…either way, it’s up to the two people to learn for themselves whether or not they are compatible regardless of the information you may or may not falsely post. I am in a committed relationship and plan on marrying the man I met. Your site? It was no better than a forum or an instant messenger program.

    Still, kudos for actually admitting you deceived your users at some point. Because, making an online dating site that simply helps couples come together would be too easy, eh?

  47. Steven says:

    I look at % match first, main photo second, details third, then the rest of the pics and lastly read the whole profile. This seems to me to be the fastest way for me to determine a good match. I hope I wasn’t shown the wrong % match, that would have prevented me from going further. While I understand the need to improve the system, don’t do it at the expense of the system. If I cannot trust the system, I will use another one.

  48. sean mann says:

    Thank you,
    that was very enlightening. I did meet one woman on O.K. stupid (that’s what we call it). She was a frustrated perfectionist with delusions of grandeur and a borderline personality disorder, but she could outfuck a busload of cheerleaders. So just keep stumbling in the dark, we just wanna rub our nasty parts together!! Thanks for all your hard work and dedication.
    Sean Mann

  49. AnthroMechari says:

    So, what we’re hearing from all of this is that Okcupid is in the worst state it’s been in since it started? Not news.

    What WOULD be new is adding Poly, non-Monogamous, Trans, Queer, Gender Queer, Pansexual and a whole host of other options it is lacking to orientations, relationship types and genders.

    Right now, this site is so black and white, the inventor of the TV might as well have come up with it. How about propelling Okcupid into the 21st century already?

  50. Mitch says:

    Though I do enjoy statistics, I find it hard to take any of this seriously as experimental data. Far too much is unaccounted for. The data may lead one quickly to believe that personality means almost nothing to anyone when compared to looks. This really isn’t the case.

    First of all, to all of the “holier than thou” people, looks are important to virtually everyone pursuing a sexual relationship and there is nothing wrong with that. Especially considering that most people are looking for monogamy.

    Of course, personality is important, but the text of a profile is usually more ambiguous than the photos. “I like to go out drinking but I also enjoying staying in and watching Netflix” may be boring, but may not necessarily say more than they aren’t good at writing a profile. Someone who is obese won’t be able to hide it in photos, whereas a controlling A-hole probably won’t mention that they are in their profile. Furthermore, you can often extract personality traits from looks/photos. Like, if they have many mirror selfies, duck face instead of smile, an awful tattoo, etc.

    Yes, looks are important, but not as much as analysts would have you believe.