YouTube has become the de-facto platform for video sharing. Hundreds and thousands of channels have come up on YouTube that are creating original content and reaching millions of viewers. Over the last few years, several Islamic Channels have gained prominence on YouTube and have been able to gather a huge following. However, YouTube, being an open platform contains videos of all types including videos that promotes things that Islam doesn’t allow. Hence, for Muslim audiences, especially parents who were allowing their kids to watch videos on YouTube, there is always an element of concern.
Taqva.com was founded with a vision to create an Islamic Video platform, where viewers can be certain of finding only Islamic content. Started in March’2016, Taqva.com is now reaching to almost 50,000 viewers each month. Taqva.com currently has over 1500 Islamic videos, including lectures from several prominent Islamic Scholars. The primary audience of Taqva.com is kids below 10 years. Taqva.com has a separate section for the kids, where they can Islamic Stories in cartoon format.
“The idea of Taqva.com is extremely simple. It’s a platform, where users can find the best Islamic videos. We have a team of volunteers who search across the internet for new outstanding Islamic videos. Selected videos are posted on Taqva.com” says Sumiya Faruq, Founder of Taqva.com. After completing her Computer Science Engineering, Sumiya joined a Fin-Tech company to peruse her career as a software engineer. While she was fast progressing in her career, she always felt that, she needs to give back to her community. That led to the birth of Taqva.com.
As per the market research, an average adult Muslim in metropolitan areas spends about one hour watching Digital Islamic Content per week on various media such as WhatsApp, TV, Facebook, YouTube, etc. With the rise of Islamophobia across the world, the Muslims have further become religious and looking for insightful content to hold on to their religion.
“Our vision by 2020 is to reach 100 million Muslims and become the largest repository of Islamic Content in the world. If each of our user spends one hour per week, then we will be delivering 400 million hours of Islamic Content per month in 2020. Those numbers would exceed the lectures that could be delivered at all the madrasas in the world combined. That is the potential we are talking about” adds Sumiya.
Taqva.com is now planning to establish a full-time team of 10 people in Hyderabad, India. The team would consist of 3 Software developers, 4 content editors and 3 member marketing team. Taqva.com will soon introduce halal-advertising on the site to ensure costs of operations are met.
“We are seeking an angel investment for setting up the engineering and marketing team. Our engineering roadmap includes releasing both android and iOS Apps. We will also be upgrading our servers as the user load has substantially increase. For the marketing, our target is to reach 1 million viewers by mid of 2018” says Sumiya Faruq.
