The green-eyed monster of jealousy is never an attractive thing – especially in relationships. But that’s what seems to have motivated China’s Netease (NASDAQ:NTES), which is better known for its online gaming services, to launch a new location-based dating app.
Bearing the not very catchy name TongCheng YueHui (literally meaning ‘dating in the same city’), it looks to be Netease’s response to the success of the flirty Momo app, made by a tiny Beijing startup, which has rocketed to 16 million users and is even rolling out internationally. Some might even say that Netease is trying to clone the app – a common tactic among China’s major web companies.
TongCheng YueHui – as with Momo – is centered around an app (pictured above) that finds nearby users of the opposite gender and lets you chat with them directly and simply. So far, there’s just an iPhone app, with no signs of an Android version. But the new service is not strictly mobile only. Perhaps because Netease is an old-skool web portal company and it cannot resist page-views, there’s also a full dating site at Yuehui.163.com. That means bad news for China’s other major dating websites, like Baihe, and Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE) with its 5.5 million users. Like the old-style match-making sites, Netease’s TongCheng YueHui also has a virtual currency, and you’ll need to buy some to get more things done.
So, in summary, the new service is either a very clever or highly awkward mix of a traditional dating site and a new mobile LBS app. We’ll have to wait and see how receptive users are – and which rival site will see the most damage from a major web portal entering this sector.
In other Netease news recently, the company revealed that it has 260 million registered users on its Twitter-like Netease Weibo site.
Check out the TongCheng YueHui iPhone app on its new homepage.
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