Hot on the heels of a posting titled 'Differentiate (Your Avatar) or Die' by Michael (aka planetc1) over at Sphinn, and following the unique experince had recently by one of the ladies here in our office, I was prompted to create an avatar experiment and then test it. Essentially, she (our female staff member) changed her StumbleUpon avatar, and upon doing so, her friend count increased very quickly with virtually no effort.

Now, I'm sure many of you have theories about this, but it certainly caused many of us at SEP to chat and theorize in the office. After much debate, we hypothesized that:

The Hypothesis:
a "Cute woman" avatar would likely result in more friends, given the same effort, than an absolutely drop dead gorgeous woman, as its more likely that the cute girl is real and wasn't created specifically to garner friends. We also hypothsized that both women would generate more friends organically than a guy's avatar.

So … we thought we'd design an experiment to test our hypothesis.

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox from Movie "Two Girls and a Guy"

The Experiment:

a) Create 3 separate Stumbleupon profiles with 3 different avatars, one for each character:

1) Drop Dead Gorgeous Female – subjective yes, but all the straight guys in the office agreed
2) Cute Female – again subjective, but all the guys in the office agreed
3) A Guy – just an average guy … but the gay guys in the office liked him

We decided to keep the text profile for each remarkably similar to reduce the probability that something other than the avatar would impact the experiment.

b) Next, we identified 200ish Stumblers in the given space. I can't release specifics to protect the innocent .

c) Then, we monitored and reported the number of people who became "mutual friends" of each profile.

The Results:

The Avatar (Mutual Friends)
The Guy (14)
The Cute Woman (17)
The Gorgeous Woman (18)

meaning the extremely attractive female secured 29% more friends naturally, than did the man. Not certain whether or not its statistically significant, but it is significant none-the-less.

Disclaimers:
We isolated as many variables as possible, but are not scientists … so take everything with a grain of salt.
Do not try this experiment at home!

Conclusions:
1) Indeed, your avatar does appear to affect your organic popularity on StumbleUpon … something I think we all intuitively understood anyway. Now, I'm not advocating creating false avatars, but certainly you should always portray yourself in the best possible light.

Other Interesting Findings:
2) Females are much less likely than males to befriend someone they don't know … even other females.

3) Between 5-10% of the StumbleUpon population will friend you if you friend them first, even with absolutely no history. These percentages will obviously increase if you communicate with them in some fashion.

All in all, and interesting and fun study.

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15 captivating comments

Can we actually see the avatars?

Adam Taylor  ^#

Nice find, I will try it for a day and see if it improves friend requests

Matt Ridout  ^#

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff…. There you go getting me thinking again. You really have to stop that brother. Now that you have the profiles running, time for more fun no? Give them personalities. Maybe have one girl Stumble ‘naughty’ stuff, the Girl Stumbles ‘nice stuff’ and why not have a few of the boys make the fella obviously gay?

Then see whom is most popular :0) ….. if only we had the time…

Talk soon – Dave

theGypsy  ^#

Great piece of study, Jeff. I'm going to change my avatar asap

Wiep  ^#

Cute – gets your visitors

Sexy – gets you added as friend AND visitors

Godlike sexy hotty – Your site would be the biggest hit, your profile is added thousands of times and you'll most likely make tons of cash..

Michael Woo  ^#

@ Wiep – can't wait to see the 'hot' you Wiep!

@ Michael Woo – great point! More to study I suppose.

Jeff Quipp  ^#

Did all three of the fictitious Stumblers come from Ontario? If so I think I've rumbled you

Mike – Twenty Steps  ^#

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Social Media and Gender Issues | Social Desire  ^#

This study is really interesting. Now I'm having a thought of changing my avatar..^^

Internet Marketing Joy  ^#

[...] or avatar! Suppose you send a friend request to me on Digg and I am familiar with your name (or avatar) from some other social networking site such as, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, reddit or Sphinn, I [...]

5 Things I Look For When Adding You On My Digg's Friend List  ^#

that's some illustrative point. yeah, girls would tend to add those of the same gender even if they dont know them.

zwinky cheats  ^#

Interesting study, I agree with the conclusion and also Michael Woo's comment, it's human habits and human character as a sinner, so that the sexier the avatar the more hit he/she will get.

Cari duit  ^#

now you got me thinking of changing my avatar. paris hilton maybe? ^^

nigelmcloughlin  ^#

loll the heading of this post is funny and yes even me i am a normal guy using internet for work not to find womens sometimes click on women profiles i mean thats totally un-intentionally then i simply leave. and using some place without an avatar leaves different impact.

MOin  ^#

Your experiment is a good idea. It confirmed a couple of theories of my own, and I agree with your findings. Also, in reference to people friending you if you friend them first, it's likely that they either: A) Believe that you know them, but don't remember who you are or B) They realize what your motive is and have a similiar one, so they return the favor.

April Bowlby  ^#