Slowtwitch in 2025: Behind the Numbers

We know, we know: it’s already the second week of January. Enough with the 2025 wrap-up stuff! We hear you.

But — we wanted to give you, our community, a peek behind the curtain that helps make Slowtwitch what it is. And in order to do that, we’ve got to take a look at the year we just closed up.

It’s our first full year with our new content management system online for the editorial side of the site. It’s also our first full year since we rolled out the revamped forum. In total we, in conjunction with our technical partners at Federated Computer, The massive task of migrating tens of millions of pieces of content, user accounts, etc. into their new homes. And although the move itself certainly had some minor hiccups, we are certainly glad we did it. And we are certainly glad we did it with them; if only so that our system can handle large-scale photos, consistently, across stories and in the forum.

I spent most of December on the sidelines on the editorial front, instead doing a very deep dive into our statistics, our stories, and what that data is telling us in terms of the direction we need to steer the ship in. (I hope some of you missed my patented Freezing Cold Takes.) Unlike some years, though, there was a ready team of folks contributing all month long. We’ve been fortunate here at Slowtwitch to add the likes of Kevin, Ben, and Sarah to our roster and to deliver the independent storytelling that is the core ethos of Slowtwitch. We produced over 500 articles last year at Slowtwitch — an 80% jump in our written output over 2024.

In total, between the front page and the forum, we had nearly 50 million page views. The editorial site had visits from over 3 million unique users, with the forum just under 2.5; we can’t tell you how much overlap there is between those two audiences, but we’re sure it’s a fair number of you. Those are up healthily over 2024 for us as well.

You can find some more of our specific stats below:

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There’s a couple of things that I wanted to call out that don’t sit in the above stats.

Our 10 Most Read Stories of 2025

As I have joked many times in our forum, there simply ain’t no drama quite like triathlon drama. Our most read stories of the year almost always involved some type of newsworthy controversy. And if it didn’t involve that, well, it involved bikes. Because we love bikes.

• Run Race Winner Disqualified for Wearing HOKA Skyward X
• Aero Evolution: Kona Pro Bike Positions
• Lessons From the IRONMAN x TriDot Break-Up
• On IRONMAN and Prohibited Running Shoes
• IRONMAN Announces Performance-Based Qualifying for Kona and 70.3 World Championship
• Update on Stolen Bikes from IM Copenhagen
• World Triathlon Updates Hydration Rules
• Canyon Wins the Men’s 2025 IRONMAN World Championship Bike Count
• Canyon Issues Multiple Stop Ride Notices, Including Speedmax CF
• Wahoo’s New KICKR Desk V2

As compared to our 2024 most read stories, we had 22% more traffic to these articles than we did last year. I’m almost begging for the current professional draft zone discussion to take on the kind of life that over 40 millimeter stack shoes and water bottles did…

…nah.

Moving Into 2026

We’ve alluded to the fact that we’re continuing to expand our coverage in various areas. IRONMAN remains a big news generator for us, and Triathlon is our home, but we’re continuing to meet endurance athletes where they are and what interests them. It’s triathlon, yes, but it’s also trail running, gravel racing, and road running that all are critical to who we are and what people are reading.

We’ll also be producing more exclusive content to various platforms. We toyed with this a bit during the IRONMAN World Championships this past year, with a variety of content hosted between our front page, our social channels, our podcast, and more. That mix of distribution gives us more paint and canvas to work with, and in turn, more engagement; we more than doubled social impressions alone during World Championship season over 2024, along with healthy increases in readership and engagement on the front page and the forum over the same time period.

That said, like with all digital media, there are challenges. Search engines and social platforms increasingly try to keep users engaged on their wholly-owned platforms, rather than distributing traffic to other channels. Users don’t click on stories posted to Facebook to come here; instead, people sit in the echo chamber of that social network. Increasingly, it’s the same with Google and Bing, as their AI Quick Answer boxes deliver immediate, skimmable surface-level answers to the query, and don’t send people to the actual deep-dive behind it.

There are three things that you, as a reader, can do to help out with that. First, you can set Slowtwitch as a “preferred source” when searching on Google. It means that, when you’re reviewing News content, we’ll appear towards the top of your results for a given related query. The second, of course, is sharing Slowtwitch when and where you can. I’m only here on Slowtwitch because, back in 2010, a friend of mine at the running store I was working at referenced a thread and introduced me to it. Whether it’s the forum, a story you found engaging, our podcast — we appreciate the sharing our audience does. Lastly — please join in the conversation on the forum. About 80% of our active users on the forum are consumers, rather than contributors. Not because they don’t have anything good to share, but we know that sometimes new members feel a little intimidated or scared. Don’t be. Let the community hear your thoughts, advice, and contributions.

We’re looking forward to a great 2026 together — hope to see you out there.