Odnoklassniki will launch a dating service in 2025

Appointments will be free, but will also have “paid options familiar to the Odnoklassniki audience,” the company noted.

According to the publication’s source, the service is being developed for people who use “classic dating sites” such as LovePlanet and Friend Around. Unlike Tinder, these services allow you to exchange messages without mutual liking when viewing profiles.

Veronika Yakovleva, CEO of the Twinby dating service, noted that the adult audience is of interest to dating service developers due to its stable solvency, despite the difficulties in finding dates. In his opinion, there is high competition for this audience. All major players focus on older users in the regions, so the decision to create another service seems controversial. He also noted that after Tinder, Bumble and Badoo left Russia, the market lost younger audiences.

JSC Mamba director Andrei Bronnitsky believes that social media-based dating services have a problem: users do not always want to associate their social media profiles with online dating. However, he called the launch of the service on the Odnoklassniki platform logical, since VK Dating faces difficulties in attracting an adult audience.

According to Yan Yankeloytsya, director of business development at Overmobile, the monetization of the service will be successful thanks to proven mechanisms of Odnoklassniki, such as paid gifts. He also believes that the new service will be attractive mainly to current users of the social network, as it has difficulty attracting new audiences. According to VK, in the second quarter of 2024 Odnoklassniki’s monthly audience amounted to 34.2 million people, up from 36 million the previous year. At the same time, VKontakte’s audience increased from 85 million to 87.9 million users.

• The Odnoklassniki dating service is not the first such project for VK. In 2021, the company launched VK Dating. As VK told Kommersant, in August 2024 its monthly audience exceeded 3.1 million people. Also in the mail service owned by VK there is a dating section based on the Mamba service (VK owns 28.35% of Mamba JSC), with an audience of about 70 million people in more than 50 countries.
• In 2023, Tinder, the largest dating service, stopped operating in Russia. Since then, local companies have been actively developing domestic analogues: Sunlight Dating, beAmore, Twinby, TON Dating, Yandex Match, etc.
• According to the forecasts of the Statista agency, the total revenue of all dating applications in Russia this year will reach $52.6 million, 8.8% more than in 2023.