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:
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.
Why do you think of 2.4 milion people that read the forum only 2400 actually sign up?
There’s a few reasons why:
1.) lots of single thread viewers, which usually indicates somebody landing here from Google and trying to get an answer about something;
2.) we had a bit of a reputation for being very difficult on new users, so it tended to drive others away from signing up;
3.) general difficulty in being an online community in 2026
It’s a whole lot of bucket #1, followed by the other two.
The most important factor I believe is that.. The only reason for people to sign up now is to be able to Contribute. And to @rrheisler point. Our community can be a hard one to break into. In other words if they can get all their answers to their questions without having to create an account ( which needs to be approved) There really isnt a need. It’s also just the % game. It’s like a sale funnel.. We need to do a better job at getting them “SIGN UP”
It’s something we are looking into.
I wonder how many people are not signing up because instead of engaging with real humans on here, they are engaging with AI away from here and getting answers to their questions away from here in private versus having to put their questions here in public. They can just paste content from a thread in here from AI and then go from there?
And this way they don’t need to deal with all the humans in here and deal with all the attitude and talk downs. I still think that if everyone had to use their real name, we’d have more congenial engagement and we may lose some people who take the liberty of being assholes online but we may gain some people who want to be more civil so on the balance maybe it makes this place more welcoming and creates positive momentum momentum for the community.
At least we’re not as horrible as LetsRun
While facebook has a lot of people, attaching your real name to it hasn’t made discourse any better or less (potentially) threatening.
I think it would be cool to see a few things.
1. The posting and viewing trends of long time users (5,10, 10+ years) vs new(er) users, especially given the very recent release of the USAT data.
2. % of new(er) users that stay on the site for >2, >3, >5 years
3. % of traffic that comes in specifically for gravel, running etc vs triathlon.
3B. The % of traffic that stays for that content vs triathlon
4. % of younger viewers vs older and is that growing/shrinking compared to 3,5,10 years ago. Especially given the recently released USAT data.
Thanks
Definitely would be interested, especially #3 & #4.
Side note for #1 and #2, the data wouldn’t be 100% accurate due to the forum switchover that happened. I have been on here forever, but due to the way my user name was, I lost all history and had to create a new profile.
I was kinda joking about that, but to follow up, in some seriousness:
How did we get that reputation?
How is being perpetuated? Are people talking negatively about ST elsewhere? Where and how?
How can we reverse that perception?
As far as LetsRun goes, we know how they’re perceived because they almost embrace it. I was just watching a video with Molly Seidel where she was talking about her DNF at NYC because she had a trail race the next week and didn’t want to bust herself up and commented “I’m gonna get killed on LetsRun for this…” (she won the race OUTRIGHT, BTW, first OVERALL, and set a course record)
Are people saying “I wanted to put this on Slowtwitch but I knew I’d get clobbered?” or “I don’t go to ST; those people are terrible?”
There was a Running forum that I used to post on (it’s defunct now, I’m sure) but people would say “well, you’re a Slowtwitcher” but I think they were just envious of the membership and knowledge here, vs their insular little community
I like it here, and when people ask me “do you post your running stories anywhere? They’re great” I tell them “they can be found on Slowtwitch, mostly”
well using your name did not prevent you playing childish games at the start of the world tri thread, just saying…( to add usually the short course threads are rather civil)
Interestingly, today is my Twitchiversary
Joined January 14, 2004
For real? I’m going to look into this..
I do not think we are inhospitable to newbies, in fact virtually everyone here is quite friendly and helpful in getting them into the community. No doubt this “reputation” comes from mature threads and users, the ones that do often get combative and sometimes even mean. Now for sure a lot of us regulars are used to this, and most of the time it is done with love for one another, we understand it is not personal most the time. But looking in from the outside it can look like a vipers nest on some threads, but I cannot recall any newbies getting the long time local hazing..
Now for sure there are some bot and just plain trash posts that get through, and we all have fun with those. But they are obvious troll posts the moderators miss at first glance, and we do their job for them.. (-;
In the pre-2013 era Slowtwitch, there was a lot of these types of responses to new users:
“Learn to use the f***ing search bar”
“Why are you here”
“We’ve discussed this a thousand times already”
“Go away”
I had found my way in the door through a friend of mine, who was kinda active, but not. And he warned me in advance of what I was getting myself into.
We started weeding some folks out of here at that time, which is also around the time Slowtwitch went mobile-responsive for the first time.
There was a Herbert story around at the time with a female athlete that did not go well; a whole lot of “what are women complaining about” during the 50 Women to Kona era; and some other various takes that did not endear themselves to many.
This was not the easiest place to break into. It has become far, far more welcoming over the past 10 years. And for the next generation of athletes, they aren’t seeing that type of behavior at nearly the same rate.
But I can count a couple of interviews, and at least one partnership, that I pitched where the subject passed because of fear around the ST Forum response.
We appreciate everybody helping make this place what it is today.
Unfortunately some of the most egregious offenders were also some of the smartest & brightest people in the world in various subjects related to triathlon, cycling, power , etc. And to be fair to them there were a ton of people who would argue with them telling them they didn’t know what they were talking about.
It was frustrating AF when these people would jump into a 5 page debate where some of the biggest brains in the world were discussing nuances only to tell someone like Andy Coggan he didn’t understand power or to tell Phil Skiba he didn’t understand training methodology. If it was 1 it was 85 people doing that.
Is ST better because of that? In some respects yes, other respects no. Triathlon & cycling have a much better understanding about how to train, use power etc than 10-20 years ago and we’ve moved past those debates.
Now I only know of 1 poster who doesn’t like me hahahaha