Though Indians continue to use Internet primarily for emailing, online dating, and matrimonials along with social networking are gaining prominence, says a survey.
"With almost half the online urban Indians (48 per cent) undertaking it, online matrimonial search has established itself as a 'mainline' online activity. Twelve million online urban Indians are using online matrimonial search, making it the 13th most popular online activity. It has also been one of the biggest 'gainers' in users among the online activities in last one year," says India Online 2007, a survey conducted by JuxtConsult, an online research solutions consultancy firm.
The survey conducted to understand the Internet users in the country adds, " Almost 60 per cent of users of both the online activities are common, i.e. 37 per cent of all Internet users undertake both online matrimony and online dating/friendship.
"This is significantly higher than last year when only 9 per cent of all Internet users undertook both the activities. In comparison to matrimony, dating/friendship is a more popular online activity with 51 per cent net users undertaking it and it ranks 10th in terms of popularity."
The latest entrant, social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook among others have already rallied up 44 per cent of the Internet time with over 11 million Indians getting hooked to it. Giving a demographic profile of Internet users in the counrty, the survey points out that South India leads the online activity with 39 per cent of all net users coming from South.
The survey also points out that only 18 per cent of net users are women and even only one in five matrimonial users are women.
The survey, which was conducted both online and offline covering more than 36,000 respondents from 31 cities spread across the country adds, "The popularity of online matrimonial search has really surged in last one year. Last year the percentage of all net users undertaking matrimonial search was only 15 per cent.
At 48 per cent usage level now, the category has seen an addition of a 33 per cent of all net users joining the category in this year."
"There is no denying that matrimonial websites are now gaining prominence if we go by the number of people who register with us. We are making it easier for them by bringing out vernacular matrimonial websites which is attracting a large section of the online matrimonial search users, " says Uday Zokarkar, Business Head, Bharatmatrimony Centre. Bharatmatrimony group (vernacular sites also included) has been voted as the most preferred matrimonial site in the survey.
Another activity, which is the second most preferred by online users, is job search. Searching jobs online is no more limited to big cities and only four out of 10 online job seekers in urban India come from the top 10 metro cities, the survey adds.
A majority of 61 per cent of online job seekers come from non-metro towns -- 31 per cent belonging to smaller non-metro towns and 30 per cent from the larger non-metros, it reveals.
The top three most prefered activities by online users as per the survey are, emailing (95 per cent), job search (73 per cent) and instant messaging (62 per cent).
