The marriages made in cyberspace

India Dispatch: Online matchmaking companies in India are becoming ever more popular as the population becomes increasingly engaged with the internet.

Marriages in India are increasingly made on the internet with the advent of several highly successful matrimonial portals in recent years. Noah Seelam / AFP

Online matchmaking companies in India are becoming evermore popular as the population becomes increasingly engaged with the internet. Weddings are a recession-proof industry in a country where tradition and high-tech seem to co-exist with little trouble, writes Anuj Chopra

In 1996, Anupam Mittal encountered a traditional marriage broker in New Delhi lugging around a briefcase full of wedding profiles, horoscopes and Vedic birth charts of various potential brides and grooms.

He went from house to house, trying to arrange a match. Every visit that resulted in a wedding earned him a tidy commission.

The marriage broker got Mr Mittal thinking: how many houses is it possible for a broker to visit each day? How much paperwork can he possibly carry around in his briefcase? Was the choice of potential spouses restricted only to his limited pool of clients? What if someone's soul mate lived not in this city but in Timbuktu? Enhancing scalability and overcoming the spatial and geographical limitations was possible only through one medium: online matrimonials.

That is how shaadi.com was born, some 15 years ago.

The web portal - which currently has 20 million users and is responsible for more than 2 million weddings so far - was last year listed among the top 20 digital brands in the country by Brand Equity and the Nielsen company.

Marriages, as the old cliche goes, are made in heaven. In India, these days, they are increasingly made in cyberspace. The perfect bride or groom could just be a mouse click away.

Several matrimonial portals - a curious mix of tradition and technology - have proliferated in recent years. They are a slight deviation from online social networking and dating websites, focused squarely on finding potential wedding partners using the vast reach and relative privacy of the web.

For a nominal fee, subscribers can rummage through databases and choose profiles that match their choice of age, religion, caste, profession, family background or even complexion. Many of them offer astrological services, and post-wedding services such as arranging honeymoon packages.

Almost 10 million weddings take place in India each year, according to the 2001 census. They are typically colourful and rambunctious celebrations. Some of the high-end weddings cost as much as US$500,000 (Dh1.8 billion), with many splurging on Middle Eastern belly dancers, European jugglers and Bollywood actors to entertain guests.

Indian weddings, although a seasonal industry, are estimated to be worth 1.25 trillion rupees (Dh103.87bn) a year. It is a recession-proof industry, growing at an annual rate of 25 per cent, according to Technopak Advisors, a management consultancy based in Gurgaon.

It has created a demand for a new set of professionals - the wedding planners, video makers and photographers, set designers and even telemarketing agents who liaise with and send reminders to guests.

With India's wedding boom, web matchmaking business has also grown. The industry is worth at least $63 million and is growing in double digits annually, according to a 2008 report by EmPower Research, a media and business research company in New York.

The communications company MSL Group Asia says some 10 per cent of India's internet users have at some point accessed a matrimonial website.

This category is the 12th most popular search on the internet in India, says a 2008 survey by the online research consultancy JuxtConsult, based in New Delhi.

The survey, conducted across 10,000 households from 31 cities, revealed India's 25 to 35 age group forms the largest subscriber base in the online matrimonial market - almost 40 per cent. The 19 to 24 age group makes up 34 per cent of all clients. The survey also revealed India's southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu formed 44 per cent of the subscriber base.

Several niche matrimonial websites have come up in recent years. One is dedicated to the remarriage market for people who are divorced, separated or widowed. h1bmarriages.com is dedicated to professionals with H1B US work visas and Indians residing overseas. Another is for those who are opposed to the practice of demanding dowry from families of brides.

But two market leaders - Mr Mittal's shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony.com, founded in 1997 by the entrepreneur Murugavel Janakiraman - together control 70 per cent of the online matrimony market between them, according to JuxtConsult.

With their impressive growth potential, matrimonial websites have become the darling of venture capitalists. Mr Mittal's internet company People Interactive, which operates shaadi.com, secured investments of $18m through leading venture capitalists Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital in 2006.

Robert Tucker, the author of Innovation Is Everybody's Business, recently named shaadi.com as one of India's "most innovative" companies. Such enterprises "have a culture of innovation and they can be expected to launch products which would have a global appeal," he says. "They have the potential to bring innovative products to the market."

The potential for growth is explosive, he says, given India's internet penetration is growing.

Some 80 million people in India have access to the internet, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. That number is expected to climb to 240 million by 2015.

With 811 million-plus mobile phone subscribers - and nearly 14 million new subscribers being added every month - India is the world's fastest-growing mobile market after China. With the advent of 3G services last year, many of mobile users are expected to be online in the coming years. The global audit and advisory services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers says India's mobile subscriber base is expected to cross 1 billion by 2014.

JuxtConsult says 44 per cent of India's online traffic uses the web only for social networking.

But there are a number of challenges. Subscriber fees, more than digital advertising, is the main source of revenue for most matrimony websites. Membership plans are charged mainly on the basis of the duration for which the profile is posted, various personalisation features and access to verified phone numbers.

But matrimonial portals that provide free membership such as desispark.com threaten to lure away subscribers.

Many in India are not computer savvy, some matrimonial services have set up bricks-and-mortar offices, which increases operational costs. With low credit card penetration - less than 20 million people in India use plastic money - many have to rely on alternative collection channels for payments, which also increases costs.

Cases of online fraud and fake profiles is also an area of concern.

But the biggest limitation is the very nature of the matchmaking business. Subscription is ended once a partner is found, which essentially means the service is typically a one-time transaction.

Gourav Rakshit, the business head of shaadi.com, says the firm is constantly innovating services to counter that limitation.

The company is now considering entering the lucrative post-wedding segment - wedding planning, catering and cards distribution.