It’s all over for all dating oriented apps which are flexing muscle in India and elsewhere while claiming pole position over the competition. An elephant is coming and likely to disrupt the matchmaking segment. With a staggering 2.2 billion user base, the world’s largest social network is launching a dating product.
Facebook’s top brass- Mark Zuckerberg has announced that one of world’s largest valued company is s building a dating product meant for finding a meaningful relationship.
Drawing an urge of such product from 200 million users who mark their relationship as ‘single’, Facebook wants to find a real match for them. While the yet to be launched product would be global in nature, India will experience a profound impact.
Facebook has about 250 million active users in India and the second largest user base for the social networking giant. Besides India, Facebook also has wielded a greater impact in Bharat (rural India) owing to its use case. At the same time, dating isn’t a mainstream activity in semi-urban and rural India.
Facebook dating product is slated to change this by not pairing your existing friends and family (a deterrent to dating in India). Most importantly, it won’t let friends peep into your dating profile.
Following the news of Facebook ushering into dating affair, Shares of Match, which owns Tinder, OkCupid and its namesake Match.com witnessed 17.5 per cent down in its share trading in stock market.
So far, likes of Tinder and Truly Madly have only been able to penetrate the premium segment in India, and its reach is limited to certain social classes in metros and top cities. When we compare it with Facebook dominance in the country, it’s negligible.
Of late, Facebook has been embroiled in controversy over privacy and data leaks via Cambridge Analytica. Such privacy issue would be more concerning for private activities such as dating. It may face some hurdle over aforementioned grounds, otherwise, it sets to disrupt the dating and relationships segments globally as well as locally.
The development was reported by Recode.
