Background

I’ve been an user of Insight Timer for 3 years since meditation trend just kick started. I’m excited to see how the app has evolved over the years. Today, I want to note down interesting analysis I got from extracting 4,384 guided tracks. Maybe this could help for someone who plans to join Insight Timer or any meditation app as an instructor.

These tracks are the most-played ones (up to 720 tracks per each category) across 7 categories: stress, anxiety, relax, depression, abundance, authenticity and happiness. I’m sure they are just small subsets of all tracks in Insight Timer.

Most played track

Guess what, the most played track hit 4 million play counts, like a trending Youtube video. This is amazing. And the track is a 4-min Morning meditation with music by Jonathan Lehmann. I guess the combination of simple and clear title, short duration, a good-looking guy, and of course previous reviews attracts beginners. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have played this before. I shall follow him after this.

Optimal track length

In Insight Timer, you can find various tracks from just 1–2 mins to hours (the longest in the list is 2 hours). It really caters to a wide audience. However, 67% of the tracks fall into 2 groups: 6 mins— 22 mins. I think I’m inside this group. It’s definitely a good range to get your mind settled and relaxed.

Popular instructors

While Jonathan Lehmann might have the most played track, his number of followers is just one third of Sarah Blondin’s — my favourite teacher. She has about 350 thousands of followers (and I’m one of them).

The next ones are 2 female instructors with roughly 230 thousand followers: Tara Brach and Bethany Auriel-Hagan.

Number of tracks popular instructors produced for these 7 categories are roughly 10 tracks per instructor. Sarah seems to be an amazing hit as 10/11 tracks are in top 100 most played according to my data list. As an user, I like the title, her soothing voice, her story that reflects the title and her photo of clear and simple side-view. Another interesting instructor is Davidji. He’s also one of the top followed instructors in Insight Timer and released 25 tracks for these 7 categories. Unlike Sarah, David only has 5 tracks made into top 100. David gave me a vibe of an old grandfather who likes to live with nature.

Another reason why these instructors are so popular is because they joined Insight Timer in the early day, 2014–2015. I also saw Gisele Bündchen (supermodel) in the list but since she joined recently (2020), her followers are still small, about 300k at this point.

Top 100 tracks

Below are 10 most-played tracks that are played 1 million times and above:

• Morning Meditation With Music
• Mindfulness For Releasing Anxiety
• Learning To Surrender
• Law of Attraction & Abundance
• Deep Healing
• One Minute Meditation
• Breathing Meditation
• Accepting And Letting Go
• Decrease Anxiety & Increase Peace Morning Meditation

The most used words in titles (700 times across 4000 tracks) are Learning, Self-Compassion, Soften, Moment, Connect, Reconnect and Mini-Break. Strangely, the most played tracks don’t contain any of these words. So maybe title doesn’t play much role in getting users to play. Or users are “zoned out” when they see these words too often already.

Instructors all over the world

Insight Timer enables instructors from all over world to join. However, the most dense places with 10% of the instructors are Los Angeles, London and Sydney NSW. Other places are more sporadic.