Ignighter caused quite a scene in the NY dating front when it was launched a couple of years ago and introduced a new branding of dating sites targeting ‘group dating’. The idea is simple, you create or join a group and invite others to that group sharing the same interests or passion. In this way it makes for easier introductions such as no one-to-one ice breakers required which is often the most difficult hurdle to cross in one-to-one dating. Although Ignighter was growing in USA, the founders found a bigger market shaping up in India and now it’s quite the buzzword over there, climbing to high levels in the India’s traffic marketing report for internet sites.

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Now comes the last step in which you have to upload your profile picture. You can skip the photo uploading step altogether and registration comes with a 3 days free trial.

If you are already a facebook member, you can also register through this facebook account.

Login & Customizing Profiles

User can login via facebook account or you can login via email address and password that you entered during registration. This seems to be a very common thing these days and one where it puts facebook in good standing since all these sites are relying on this mega-site to make life easy for users.

Editing the information following registration is just not there and is not available with the free trial.

Rules like allowing/not allowing persons or groups of specified age, location, type of relations they are looking and thing they have common are just not the part of customization.

Photo Profile Section

As mentioned earlier you can upload your photograph from your computer directly and is common to most dating sites.

You can upload only one photo to your profile and seems like a limitation. The rules for uploading pictures is not there but probably hidden somewhere in the site usage agreement.

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Browse & Search Feature

Browsing through this site is simple as there are very few options available and accessible from the top menu.

This being a group dating site, search is not the primary feature of the site.

For searching there is a search bar at the top of the site where user just needs to type in the place, city and country to search.

You get a list of matched groups that are found in that location.

Unfortunately, the search does not allow you to find groups according to your choice of likes or dislikes.

Messaging

Messaging is designed well comprises of sending mail and Icebreaker but you can use it only if you are a paid member of the site.

You can send unlimited number of messages to the members and reply to them.

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Sending smile, kisses, gifts and IM are also not available on this site.

What’s Missing

Looking at the theme of the site (Group dating site) and living in a cyber-age of web storage, I definitely think videos need to be a part of this site to attract more users and give this site an extra edge over it’s competitors.

I also feel, there should be a wide approach and more questions to be asked in the profile creation part, so that it will be easier for the site to provide a more accurate match to it’s members.

Member Base

The site has obtained a good member base and as the site has been designed for the audience’s of all over the world it has worked well in the far eastern countries such as India and Singapore. See our Dr Dato brief on ignighter Article 1 , Article 2

As I searched near my location, I found most of the groups were near to me and the member’s age group range mainly from 20’s to their 40’s.

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Longevity

Personally I tried using the site for a good few hours and I found many members that suit my lifestyle and profile.

I am expecting a healthy response from them and the longevity can be determined after few more visits to the site.

Ranking Statistics

The site has been launched in Jan 2010 since then the number of members has been increasing.

In comparison to the previous year, the website is loosing the member base and the site has only got unique members totalling 2,188 in Jan 2011 which shows -20 % decrease.

But the good news for the site still has 75.77% increases in it’s total visits which are 5,398 (including old and new).

The site also had Google ranking of 210,952. However, keep in mind that their business strategy has shifted to India and they are doing less in the US market, please see the recent NY times article.

Scores

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