While reading Iceland Review Online, I came across the following:
Iceland has its own online dating service, einkamal.is, but it leaves MUCH to be desired. It’s not the site so much as the society. In a population of 300,000, blind dating is a bit like playing gin-rummy with a deck of five; you know all the cards the others are holding. Plus the same face cards seem to pop up on the screen over and over (and there is always the chance that you’re related closer than kissing cousins ought to be—but we don’t talk about that).
Speaking of “the gene-pool issue� and dating, there was a dating show here for a while called Djúpa laugin (The Deep End). It was set up like American show “The Dating Game� for those of you who are familiar. The bachelorette would question her three bachelors, who are hidden behind a partition. More than once it happened that when the luck bachelor popped out from behind the partition and what do you know! It’s cousin Gummi! Nothing kills a budding relationship like a little consanguinity!
Putting aside the dating cousins angle, talk about a small dating pool. The Icelandic dating scene is comparable a US niche , like here in Boston, which is about 300k people. We often spend our time talking about servicing the needs of millions of singles, and here’s a country that has one so-so dating site for 300k people. There may be other sites that I am not aware of (article says people use Nerve.com), but in a country that is so small, I bet a site like PlentyOfFish could do well (hear that Markus?)
It’s important to broaden our perspective every once in a while and examine online dating in other countries. How are dating sites different for different cultures? Does a Chinese dating site have the same functionality and profiles as a Korean or Thai site? Are search results returned in ways similar to what we have grown accustomed to, or completely different, depending on cultural differences? Parsing the differences and similarities might be exactly what you need when trying to differentiate your dating site from the other 900 sites out there.
