Dating Services

India’s largest online matrimonial services, Shaadi.com announced a partnership with Star Plus (an Indian entertainment television channel) to create a new entertainment and reality TV show that helps singles from India to find a partner for marriage. The show will document the participants from the initial meeting, until the wedding, and everything in between.

The show is open to all eligible single male and female Indian residents, who can speak fluent Hindi and are aged between 22 to 25 (for females) and 22 to 30 (for males) ... To register for the show, eligible participants can log onto Shaadi.com and fill in a simple form online. Registrations will be open from 15th to 30th January 2009.

I'm not sure why Shaadi.com released the press release today since the registration time is almost up (3 more days).

For more information on one of India's most popular online dating and matrimonial sites, read our Shaadi.com review.

According to NewMediaAge, eHarmony is going to be doing a big marketing campaign in the United Kingdom. This is the first major marketing campaign for the UK version of the dating site, which launched last July (see story). For the first month or so eHarmony UK was offering free 90 day memberships to help populate their database with profiles. The digital marketing agency which eHarmony hired called Essence, will soon be launching a display, search and affiliate campaign. NewMediaAge also estimates eHarmony's US marketing budget at $160 million.

To find out more information about this popular dating service, read our eHarmony review.

Dr. Helen Fisher was at the iDate conference which was recently held in Miami. Dr. Helen Fisher is Chemistry's chief scientific advisor for their match system. David Evans of The Online Dating Insider shared with us some information he learned from her keynote speech:

• Dr. Helen Fisher studied 178k people on Chemistry.com.
• The Chemistry questionnaire has been taken by 7 million in 39 countries.

Chemistry currently has 4 million paid and registered users (info from their about us page on IAC) so it looks like just under half never signed up after the profile questionnaire.

For more information on this personality matching dating site, read our [staticpage: Chemistry review].

The first month of the New Year to Valentine's Day is the season where online dating is usually is at its busiest. The owners of Date.com and MatchMaker.com have a promotion which gives singles a 10 day free trial to try out their dating services (the original promotion was 7 days). The free trial acts just like a paid membership and gives you full email and instant messaging access. Just type in this coupon code when you sign up as a new member:

Newyears10

For more information on these 2 online dating sites, read our Date.com review and our MatchMaker.com review.

There is a promising future for mobile dating as predicted by Juniper Research. They claim the value of the chatroom market and mobile dating will grow to almost $1.4 billion by 2013. For the most part revenue will be generated by subscriptions but event-based charging (like paying a fee to contact someone or virtual gifts) and advertising will continue to become a larger part of the revenue stream.

... many companies which have migrated to this approach are seeing conversion rates amongst customers buying premium rate goods and services which generate revenues significantly in excess of those achieved under flat rate subscriptions.

By 2011 it is predicted less than 30 percent of mobile dating customers will be on a flat rate subscription model. China and Japan currently have the largest number of mobile dating customers.

There is no mention what the 2008 revenue is for this market. Currently from our reviewed online dating services, Match.com (called matchMobile), Date.com, Lavalife, DatingDirect and Shaadi.com all offer a mobile phone service along with their dating website. Other sites like MeetMoi also offer location based mobile dating based on the GPS in your phone (with lots of privacy options of course). With the rise of 3G and the large bandwidth it provides I expect to see the rise of video mobile dating as well.

For reviews on dating services that offer a mobile/cell phone dating service check out our new Mobile Dating Category.

I found more information about the new Match.com Platinum membership package that will soon be available to all members (from this Story). Match.com already has information available under the Help section when you log into the dating site. It is under the Searching and Dating section and the topic is called Platinum. The first thing I saw was this new membership package is available in some test markets. This means most members will not see the new package in the upgrade area but some of you will. Please comment on this story if you have any pricing information or where the test markets are. The help section also confirms that with this subscription 100 percent of Match.com members will be able to respond for free to your emails and Instant Messages. I'm glad they included IM in the package. Platinum members are identified by an icon on their profile (visible to only non paid members). The Help section also mentions that free members can contact you for free. This is a huge bonus for members. Most paid dating sites who allow free members to contact other members only allow this once the paid member has initiated communication. Match.com definitely has taken a bold step here and turned their dating service partially free.

The Platinum membership may also be purchased as an add-on to any existing membership. No cost information is available at this time. I believe also the Platinum subscription package is available to only online daters in North America.

While I was on Match, I noticed the new Smart Search feature has received an additional upgrade. The results page has been updated to include a Refine Your Search section. This allows you to easily refine your search scope for the following attributes, photos available, age ranges and location ranges. For each attribute range it also gives the total number of profiles which fit within the range.

For more information on this award winning online dating site, read our Match.com review.