Kijiji (ebay subsidiary) offers free matrimonial services in India
In an earlier post, I talked about disrupting the online matrimonial market by offering free services and removing the pay-to-contact model.
Well, Kijiji (quite a tongue twister - means village in Swahili) seems to have taken note of my post. Kijiji has introduced free matrimonial services for 12 Indian cities. The goal is to serve as a friendly online neighborhood matrimonial service. As of now, the site is very sparsely populated and breaks in FireFox. There are also several listings on the site which seem bogus as of now.
Based on a visit to their website and the bogus listings, you would be tempted to brush them aside as an impending failure. You may argue that free matrimonial services will not be able to weed out imposters, bogus profiles and online predators. But before you make any judgements, here’s a brief background on Kijiji (from Wikipedia):
Kijiji (Swahili for village) is a centralized network of online urban communities for posting local classified advertisements. It is a subsidiary of eBay and was launched in March 2005. Kijiji websites are currently available for more than 300 cities in Germany. Further Kijiji countries are France, Italy, Canada, India, Taiwan, Republic of China and Japan.
They have a pretty large community in some of the above listed countries and considering that they are an ebay subsidiary, they definitely have the muscle to pull off such a move in India. When Craigslist started out in the US, it was also very susceptible (and still is) to scams, frauds, predators and their brethren. Over time, they have mastered the art of weeding out such stuff from the site.
Kijiji will face some of the same challenges by offering free matrimonial services in India. The user adoption is also not going to happen overnight.
None the less, I think that ‘Free‘ is the future model for Indian matrimonial market. It’d be interesting to see how BharatMatrimony and Shaadi respond to this move.
What is your take on free matrimonial services ? Do you think it will succeed ?
April 6th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Such listing is a good logical extension for matrimonial classifieds. Online Matrimonial Matchmaking is a totally different ballgame. you cannot compare both, as they offer very different kind of services. There is a big difference between a search enabled online database and matchmaking.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:08 am
shaadi, bharatmatrimony etc. are all matrimonial classifieds only. Just probably a more richer form.
April 6th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
[...] Startupduniya has an article about Kijiji offering free matrimonial services in India. I agree with the author’s observations about the site’s current situation - bogus entries and sparsley populated site. [...]