What Is a Return Rate?
A return rate measures how effective your content is at bringing listeners back to Insight Timer the next day. For example, if 100 people listen to your track today and 80 return to use the app tomorrow, your track's return rate is 80%.
What Counts as a Return?
When we measure returns, we're looking at whether listeners come back to the app at all—they don't have to listen to the same track. Activities that count as a return include listening to any track, completing a course, journaling, joining a live event, using the meditation timer, or checking in.
How We Calculate Your Bonus
We allocate 25% to 30% of all teacher income to the return rate fund. The amount you earn each month depends on how your content compares to similar content on the platform. Here's our process:
- We organize content by type: We group all tracks into five categories—Guided, Sleep, Music, Kids, and Non-English. We do this separately for free and paid content (including courses). This ensures each track is only compared to others in its own category.
- We calculate the average return rate for each category: Next, we find the average return rate for each group. For example, the average return rate for free guided tracks might be 76% (this is a sample number).
- We identify above-average tracks: If your track's return rate is higher than the average in its category, it qualifies for a bonus. This bonus is the additional amount you'll receive each month, reflecting how well your track performs compared to similar ones.
If your tracks consistently bring people back to Insight Timer, you'll earn extra each month. The higher your return rate compared to others in your category, the more you'll earn.
Why We Use Different Categories
We group content by type to keep things fair and support diversity. Different types of content naturally have different return rates. For example, music often brings people back more than guided tracks, while kids' content can see lower rates than both. By grouping similar types of content together, we ensure teachers who create valuable but niche content are compensated fairly. This helps keep a wide variety of content available on the app.
Finding Your Return Rate
You'll see your return rate percentage next to each track inside your Teacher Dashboard.
Quality Tiers: Excellent, Great, or Good
We use three quality tiers—Excellent, Great, and Good—to show how your content performs compared to others in the same category (Guided, Sleep, Music, Kids, or Non-English). Since each category has its own benchmarks, a "Great" rating in one category might only qualify as "Good" in another. This also extends to free versus paid content.
For example, an 80% score for a free guided track might constitute a "Good" rating, but the same score for a paid guided track might not reach the same tier, and therefore won't be eligible for a bonus.
On your dashboard, you'll see one of these quality tiers next to each eligible track:
Tracks Without a Return Rate
If some of your tracks don't show a return rate on the dashboard, it means they haven't been played by enough unique users yet. We require a minimum number of plays before we can calculate a reliable return rate.
How to Improve Your Return Rate
Understanding what drives higher return rates isn't an exact science—as we learn more, we'll share our findings with you. So far, we've seen that:
- Teachers who actively engage with their community members and encourage them to return to their practice regularly tend to have higher return rates.
- Meditation tracks that encourage regular daily practice tend to have higher return rates. Examples include Daily Gratitude, Morning Affirmations, Prayers, and Intention Setting practices.
- Adding tips to track descriptions that guide community members on how to use the track can help boost return rates. For example: "To turn your practice into a habit, listen to this track every day for 30 days."
- Teachers who promote Insight Timer via their own external channels tend to have higher return rates. Conversely, teachers who encourage listeners to leave Insight Timer naturally tend to have lower return rates.
Should You Remove Low-Performing Tracks?
No. Tracks with low return rates don't negatively impact your overall performance because we don't calculate an average return rate per teacher. Tracks with lower return rates can still generate meaningful income from plays—they just won't qualify for additional bonuses.