Building the App and Revenue Model for Australia’s Largest Islamic Media Organisation
Industry
Media / Not-for-profit
Company size
11 - 50 Employees
About
OnePath Network is a non-profit Islamic media organization and production studio based in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 2014, it aims to educate Muslims and non-Muslims by producing contemporary, high-quality video content—including documentaries, podcasts, and spiritual reminders—that reflects an authentic Islamic perspective.
“Halcrow's project management has been great, and they own problems and manage things well.”
Since 2018
Increase to top-line revenue since using Artifact
The Situation
OnePath Network is Australia’s largest Islamic media organisation — a not-for-profit Islamic production studio founded in 2014 whose mission is producing and distributing Islamic content for da’wah around the world. By the time they celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2024, they had accumulated over 2 billion views across their platforms. Their YouTube presence alone places them among the most-watched Islamic media operations in the English-speaking world.
The relationship with Halcrow began in 2018, when OnePath had a clear digital problem: the audience they had built across social platforms didn’t have a home. There was no owned platform — no app, no structured content destination — where their growing community could engage with OnePath content outside of YouTube and Facebook.
The opportunity was significant. A not-for-profit media organisation with 2 billion views had no way to convert that audience relationship into sustainable revenue. No subscription model. No direct content distribution. No first-party data. Every viewer lived on someone else’s platform, under someone else’s algorithm.
Malaz Majanni and Rami Alcheikh had a clear ambition: build an owned platform that could serve their audience and generate the revenue stream that would let OnePath continue producing and scaling the content its community depended on.
Key Result Metric: A live mobile application on iOS and Android with a functioning subscription revenue model — converting OnePath’s existing audience into paying members who supported the mission directly.
Why they called us
The engagement began with a monetisation strategy workshop. OnePath requested the workshop documentation after the session — a sign of how seriously they were taking the commercial architecture of what they were building. A not-for-profit media organisation building a subscription app was making a structural bet: that their audience’s relationship with the mission was strong enough to convert into recurring payment.
That bet required getting the product right. The content had to be accessible, the subscription experience had to be frictionless, and the underlying platform had to be reliable enough to support an organisation whose reputation rested on consistent output.
Halcrow was engaged to design and build the full platform: the mobile application, the API backend, the subscription infrastructure, and the ongoing operational support that would keep it running.
Law 1: Start with the objective. The objective wasn’t “build an app.” It was “create a sustainable revenue stream that funds Islamic content production for an audience of millions.” Every product decision was grounded in that.
How we worked
Phase 1: Building the Platform (2018–2020)
The OnePath Network app was built as a full-stack mobile and web platform. The full name published to the stores — OnePath Network: Islamic Videos, Azan Prayer Times — deliberately described the core value proposition: Islamic video content and prayer time functionality, two features with genuine daily utility for Muslim users.
The application included iOS and Android native apps, a searchable video content library, Azan and prayer time functionality, user accounts with social login and store identity support, onboarding flows, and seasonal content categories including Ramadan-specific programming.
A separate API layer connected the mobile apps to OnePath’s content infrastructure. The backend handled user management, content synchronisation, notification delivery, and eventually subscription lifecycle management. The platform ran on AWS, with SendGrid handling transactional email and monthly DevOps reporting giving leadership visibility into platform health.
Phase 2: Monetisation — Building the Subscription Model (2021)
The most commercially significant phase was the design and build of the subscription layer. The architecture included free trial tracking by user identity, month-to-month subscription with no minimum lock-in, in-app subscription management, promotional banners on Explore and Watch surfaces, re-subscription flows, and user dump data updated to reflect trial tracking.
When Google Play issued a subscription policy compliance notice in September 2022, the team updated the store listing, app name, short description, and subscription policy representation directly. Getting this right mattered commercially: a Play Store compliance failure could have cut off a revenue stream.
Phase 3: Long-Term Operational Partnership (2021–2024)
The platform ran continuously from launch through 2024, with Halcrow managing version releases, API lifecycle management, security responses, SSL renewals, app store compliance, user support, and structured handover. When OnePath moved toward internal management, the app and API codebases were transferred to OnePath’s GitHub, AWS and SendGrid access was handed over, and original onboarding design assets were located and provided years later.
WHAT CHANGED
OnePath Network went from having no owned platform to operating a mature, revenue-generating mobile application serving their audience across iOS and Android. The subscription model gave the organisation a direct financial relationship with its community — one that didn’t depend on YouTube’s algorithm, Facebook’s ad policies, or any third-party platform’s continued goodwill.
By their 10th anniversary in 2024, OnePath’s CEO Malaz Majanni was reflecting on a decade of success that included platform infrastructure built and operated through this partnership. The relationship that began with a monetisation strategy workshop in 2018 ran for six years.
WHY THIS WORKED
Not-for-profit media organisations face a structural tension: the mission requires resources, but donation-dependent revenue models are fragile at scale. A subscription model that converts audience relationship into recurring revenue is a more resilient foundation — but only if the product experience justifies the payment.
The OnePath subscription worked because the platform delivered genuine daily utility — prayer times and Azan — alongside the content library. Users had reasons to open the app that weren’t contingent on whether they had seen a specific video that week. The combination made the subscription feel like membership in something, not payment for access to a content catalogue.
Law 9: The constraint is usually organisational, not technical. The technical work of building the app was solvable. The harder problem was designing a revenue model that was consistent with a not-for-profit Islamic media organisation’s identity — one that asked an audience to pay while being transparent that the payment supported a mission, not shareholders.