Shaadi & BharatMatrimony Continue To Spar; Do Consumers Care?

Shaadi.com announced recently that its mobile matrimonial service now supports 9 different languages – English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Bengali. Shaadi.com on Mobile was launched in English exclusively on Vodafone last year.

The service is priced at Rs. 6/min to search and listen to profile details, Rs. 10/interest expressed, Rs. 10 per profile forwarded through SMS and Rs. 10/min to connect and chat with an interested member, the press release said.

Members will be able to search and listen to suitable member profiles, express or decline interest in other members, access their messages. It is available on SMS (by sending Shaadi as an SMS to 57007), Voice (by calling 57007) and WAP.Shaadi.com. It is a free service.

In response to Medianama’s queries on the performance of Shaadi.com on Mobile, Gourav Rakshit, Business Head, Shaadi.com shared the following numbers for the WAP platform:

— Almost 37000 unique visitors from December 2008 to February 2009
— Averaged about 12000 repeat visitors every month.

He said that Gujarat brings in the highest revenue at over 17%, followed by Uttar Pradesh at 14.7%, Andhra Pradesh at 12.3%, Delhi at 11.7% and Rajasthan at 10.3%. Mumbai stands 6th on the list in terms of revenue raked in, at 8.9%.

Its rival BharatMatrimony, also recently launched its WAP service with Idea Cellular. The service is paid and charges users Rs. 100 per month to view unlimited profiles and access up to 5 contacts, the press release said. The service can be accessed on IDEA’s WAP portal or at Idea.BharatMatrimony.com on the mobile internet browser by selecting Idea GPRS option. The company had launched an SMS service in 2004, according to the release. In partnership with four operators, the firm had launched the SMS service with the shortcode 5050.

The War

Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony have been trying to trump each other for a while now. In October last year, both launched call centre services for daily updates over phone, or email for relevant matches. Medianama reported on it here. Shaadi.com’s Sapphire and Bharatmatrimony’s BM Priviledge were both paid services. They announced cross media partnerships for DTH almost at the same time. Read about it here. Most recently, Shaadi.com announced a reality show with StarPlus while Bharatmatrimony chose to establish a website with news, events, video clips featuring weddings of celebrities, wedding fashion, style and bridal wear. Medianama’s coverage on it is here. While they spend their energy competing hotly to outdo each other, are their users keeping up? It does not make a difference for the consumer that a service has been launched a day ahead or late as it is not a game changing move. The industry is unlike the telecom prepaid market where users will change subscriptions for an additional feature. So unless these just marketing gimmicks to keep the brand managers active, we do not see a point to this war.