Insight Timer Introduces Yoga Classes to Audience of 18 Million to Help Instructors Build Businesses Online

Insight Yoga brings free classes to users from world-renowned instructors who want to grow their online audience without lock-ins or exclusivity.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Insight Timer, the world’s most popular free app for sleep, stress, and anxiety, today launches Insight Yoga. From October 26, students will have access to free, daily live yoga classes from leading instructors. Combining a ‘pay-what-you-can’ model for students and no contracts or exclusivity for instructors, Insight Yoga maintains Insight Timer’s conscious business model and eliminates cost as a barrier to entry for users while still providing business growth opportunities to teachers.

Insight Yoga is a natural evolution for the community-built app. 8,000 meditation teachers share over 60,000 free tracks and engage with students through live events, courses and guided meditations. Within the first seven days of announcing Insight Yoga, 7,000 instructors had signed up, highlighting the demand for instructors to scale global audiences for their now digital businesses. With an audience of 18 million students wanting wellness without persistent paywalls, Insight Timer gives instructors direct access to a global audience of yogis.

Insight Yoga is launching on October 26 starting with twenty live classes per week. Launch instructors include Colleen Saidman, Rodney Yee, Heather Lilleston, Bryan Kest, DeAndre Sinette, Koya Webb, Janet Stone, Dianne Bondy, Mathieu Boldron and Sara Ticha. Additional instructors from around the world will be added each month after a careful vetting process, ensuring high-quality, safe instruction that is accessible to everyone.

“We started Insight Timer to help connect meditation teachers with a global audience, and we are proud to extend that to yoga instructors, especially amid fractured business opportunities for the industry as a result of COVID-19,” said Christopher Plowman, co-founder and CEO. “The exposure we can offer instructors to a global community invested in mindfulness and personal development is invaluable, giving instructors back hours that they would spend marketing on other social networks to focus on teaching.”

Launch instructors say that with the yoga industry’s digital shift prompted by COVID-19, instructors’ roles morphed into marketing, accounting and technical support in order to take classes online. Insight Yoga supports them with their new priorities: grow online followers, be inclusive to all communities and earn income from classes. Even as studios reopen, digital classes will remain a part of the equation and challenge former pricing models. Insight Yoga will launch a formal paid product in 2021 to support instructors with this next step.

Insight Yoga classes will stream on the app’s live platform, which launched in May of this year in response to users seeking more connection and engagement during COVID-19 lockdowns and saw daily active users rise to 550,000. Unlike live events on social networks, Insight Timer’s experience maintains the contemplative quality of meditation with no banner ads or brand sponsors. The interactive, livestream platform allows students to comment, enabling relationship-building and instruction between students and teachers, and includes an integrated donation button for seamless payment.

About Insight Timer

Insight Timer is the world's largest free app for people with anxiety, stress and sleep problems. Diversified and included, the app offers more than 60,000 guided meditations, lectures and music tracks for free and has content in more than 44 different languages. More than 8,000 teachers from around the world share their content on the Insight Timer, including the Dalai Lama, Russell Brand, Elizabeth Gilbert, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. The community is a central part of the experience with users able to create playlists of their favorite tracks, participate in a live session with their teachers and meditate in real time with their friends and colleagues. Since 2014, Insight Timer has become the most widely used meditation app in the United States of America and has created an engaged global audience of 18 million people.