Location

The custom of arranged marriage is very popular in India but in countries like the United States and Canada it is not popular. In North America when a match could not be found locally, families from India and other Asian countries sometimes resorted to using newspaper classified sections to find a potential suitor for one of their children. This practice has now changed thanks to online dating. Dating sites like Shaadi.com have matched more than a million South Asian couples and now parents are logging on to find potential matches for their children. Many parents find "religion, mother tongue, residency status, education, caste or class, astrological sign and diet" important attributes in a mate for their child. Shaadi.com does keep track of this information within member profiles which makes it easy for parents to find matches. Roughly 20 percent of profiles on Shaadi were created by parents looking for a partner for one or more of their children. The average age of a profile is in the range of 26 to 35.

In Canada Shaadi.com has become so popular that they have opened up their first North American center in Mississauga Ontario in March of this year (close to Toronto). The greater Toronto area is home to more than 700,000 South Asian Canadians making it ideal for a matchmaking center. Shaadi also has started to promote their new center not only online, but off as well through billboards and other physical media to better reach their target audience.

To find out more details about this dating site, check out our review of Shaadi.com.

In mid March, Match.com announced a partnership with Yahoo!7 in Australia. Match.com will be the exclusive dating partner to Yahoo's Australian news and search portal as well as Yahoo!Xtra for New Zealand. You can now reach the new partnered dating service by visiting Yahoo!7 Dating or by clicking on the "Dating" menu item available on the Yahoo!7 home page.

Currently on the Yahoo!7 Dating page visitors have access to both the old dating service and the new Match.com partnered service. The original Yahoo!7 Dating will close it' doors in June, 2010.

The BBC World Service commissioned a survey which polled about 11,000 internet users from 19 different countries. The results of the study concluded that 30 percent of people who use the internet feel that the online world is a good place to find a partner. Education played a factor in this survey as well. For those people who have completed high school, 28 percent believed that dating sites worked. When compared to adults who did not finish high school, a higher percentage, 36 to be exact, thought going online was a good place to find a date.

When looking at internet users from different countries, Pakistan came in at the highest at 60 percent, followed by India at 59 percent. British participants in the survey came in at 28 percent. This was followed closely by the French at 27 percent. Americans were fairly low at 21 percent.

The overall result from this survey is fairly close to a similar statistic from another story that roughly 30 to 40 million singles in the United States use online dating sites or social networks to look for love. This is about 1/3 of single Americans or 33 percent.

For more on this survey, read the eCommerce Journal.

According to IBISWorld the online dating industry in Australia experienced a 5 percent growth in 2009. This year they predict that growth may reach 10 percent with earnings of almost $100 million AUD from advertising and subscriptions.

So how many people use dating sites in Australia? RSVP, the leading Australian dating site, surveyed more than 3000 people. They found that 50 percent had used online dating before with 10 percent of those surveyed (300 people) finding a partner on the internet. The number of active online dating accounts in Australia is also expected to increase from 1.5 million to almost 2 million by 2020.

For more on the story, read The Times of India. To find out more about Australia's leading dating site, read our RSVP review.

Back in October Match.com UK selected, the ad agency, Mother, to run their new marketing campaign (see Story). This month Mother unveiled their first commercial for Match.com.

The new ad uses the Jack and Jill icons in a fun felt animation with a female narrator telling the viewers why they should use Match.com. At the end of the ad the new tag line is shown, "Start your love story at Match.com". I thought this is an excellent slogan, much better than Match.com's North American one of "Its Okay to Look". The ad also informed the viewer that a member of Match.com finds there match once every 10 minutes on the dating site.

For further details on the story, read Marketing Magazine and to find out more about this dating site, read our review of Match.com UK.

eHarmony Australia is having a Free Communication Weekend starting this Thursday, December 31st, 2009 to Sunday, January 3rd, 2010. For some reason it is a day shorter than the North American event (see Story) but it still offers the same great value. All eHarmony members can review their matches and communicate with them for free during this 4 day event. No credit card is required.

The last eHarmony Australia free communication weekend was held at the beginning of October (see Story). By our count this is eHarmony Australia's 3rd event.

To find out why Australian singles have made this a popular online dating destination, read our eHarmony review.