e-Cupid strikes

Priyanka Joshi finds out how online dating sites are catching the fancy of today’s youth.

It’s a curse to be single on Valentine’s Day. Shruti Bachchani, a 24-year-old bank executive in Navi Mumbai, logged on to IndianDating to find herself a date. Never did she expect the 100-plus profiles on the site! “I interacted online with three or four and finally settled for a date on February 14 in a suburban shopping mall,” she says.

Elsewhere, in New Delhi, Firoze Ganjrewala was having no luck with bars, clubs, or even flirty Facebook pokes. So, he logged on to Zoosk, a dating site run like a social network that started as a Facebook app and has exploded since then. With $90 million in revenue in the past year and more than 5 million unique visitors in December 2010 according to ComScore, Ganjrewala was convinced it held the answer to his loneliness. “It’s a social experience,” is how he describes Zoosk. “There’s a news feed, you can chat with your friends and even make new friends.”

With 80 million internet users and over 700 million cellular connections, it is easy to reason why young Indians are logging on to dating websites and applications (or apps) through computers and mobile phones. All told, about 20-odd dating websites and apps have come u[. Some of the top dating sites are IndianDating.com, Ignighter.com, Date.com, and a host of apps can be found on app stores.

According to Srinivas Gopal, founder and CEO Dailydose Digital, the online business in India is pegged at Rs 600 crore and Indian dating sites contribute up to 7 per cent through advertising and virtual transactions. That’s where Gopal has decided to cash on www.cooldose.com and a registered user base of over 17,000. “Getting a date online has to be as easy as ordering a burger from McDonalds,” says he. He plans to move into mobile and social networking apps that will drive users to his site.

Rajiv Giri, president, IndianDating, claims that his site has seen “stellar growth”, even as sites like Facebook expand their foothold.

An increasing number of professionals are creating and sifting profiles on dating sites and maintain that it is convenient to chat, send text messages via mobile phones on sites like Facebook. Shreeji Khot, a 27-year-old software engineer in Hong Kong, regularly goes on dates found from an app called AreYouInterested. It is Facebook’s dating app, and has 13 million registered users. “It’s a great way to meet people at a bar or flirt via email,” he says.

AreYouInterested is clearly benefiting from viral marketing to the social network’s more than 500 million users. According to the app’s parent company, Snap Interactive, it adds more than 50,000 users a day.

Over a quarter of a billion people are set to use mobile dating and chatroom services by 2012, claims a report from Juniper Research. The UK-based research firm also adds that revenues from the two sectors will pass $1 billion by 2010, with strong growth from India contributing about 260 million users by 2012. That’s the way to go.