2020 - BIKEIOWA Year In Review

Posted Dec 20, 2020
8,940

2020 - WOWSERS - the year of the corona-virus pandemic, no RAGBRAI and lots more!

NINETEEN years! Can you believe BIKEIOWA has been around for 19 years as an informational website dedicated to making cycling better in Iowa?!?

As we mentioned in last year's review, if we look back at almost two decades, the internet was just a baby and your best place to find out about rides was Club newsletters and bulletin boards at your local bike shop. There were no cell phones, no Google, no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. BIKEIOWA (fka CIBROC) was initially created to house a small list of events and grew to become one of the most comprehensive cycling websites for Iowa bike rides, news and events in the Midwest and beyond.

We thought the Iowa cycling scene and trails were pretty darn good back in the early 2000s, but little did we know that 19 years later, the Iowa cycling scene and world-class trails system would become the envy of every other state!

2020 - WOWSERS

2020 was a roller coaster and has shaped-down to be a year no one could ever believe. It's like you took the worst part of every year for 10 years and added them all into one year and then tossed in a couple extra scoops of WTFs.

Global pandemic, social distancing, business closures, crazy general election year, race and political riots, record stock market crash and bounce-back, historic jobs losses, working from home, cash stimulus package, civil war-like tensions, US and Australian wildfires, hurricanes, toilet paper shortage, Twitter wars, record vaccination approval process just to name a few. The Zs - Zoom and Zwift became household names.

And then for more local Iowa 2020 wowsers - a Derecho! No Iowa State Fair. No RAGBRAI. No Jinglecross and pretty much every other organized cycling event was cancelled between mid-March and December.

Even with the pandemic and social distancing we tried to make lemonade from the soft-ball sized lemons that were chucked at us this year. The new Friday Fives was a 19 video series we did during Summer to showcase fives things every Friday.

Iowa State Parks Centennial - our outlet

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the Iowa state parks system.

You'll see below that we found state park excursions to be a great outlet and source of entertainment and exercise during the pandemic.

After 10 months of a global pandemic, we learned to embrace the social distancing with hiking, biking and van camping staycations in Iowa state and county parks. We ventured out during the off-season and rarely saw anyone. One of the best parts was we had most campgrounds to ourselves for only $6 per night for a non-electric site. We cooked out of the van and could remain off-grid for days thus limiting our exposure which worked out really well for social distancing.

We hope you found we able to find a safe and healthy outlet.

By the numbers

Keeping BIKEIOWA updated and ensuring timely social media posts is certainly a time commitment, but we always try to keep it fresh, frequent, and up to date.

The crazy year of 2020 did not stop the numbers, but they are not as high as they have been in the past with all the cancellations and restrictions. These numbers reflect new posts and data changes as of December 21st, 2020.

14,029 - Facebook followers
3,668 - Instagram followers
7,233 - Twitter followers
$4,462 - in Merchandise given to local events and organizations to be used for fund raising, prizes, swag and awareness. We are able to make this happen with our great sponsors!
$1,550 - Dollars donated to directly cycling causes. Again, thanks to our great sponsors!
453 - News posted with 202,547 views
282 - Events posted to the event calendar with 201,046 views
36 - Trails updated with new information with 565,974 lifetime views
26 - Reviews posted with 20,075 views
24 - Features posted with 28,821 views
19 - Friday Fives episodes with 8,387 views
6 - New trails added with 1,110 views (300 trails in total with 3,051 total trail miles and 3,202,876 million lifetime views)
5 - New cities added with 1,751 views (1014 cities in total with 8,165,154 million lifetime views)
4 - Site enhancements - behind the scenes style changes for mobile devices

We (still) believe

BIKEIOWA.com is still a unicorn in the cycling world as there are very few if any sites that list events, News and Features and many more items for 20 multi-genre cycling portals, as well as providing a portal for every trail and every city in Iowa while promoting advocacy, safety and our bicycle-friendly sponsors.

Some portals are more vibrant than others based of the information added to the site. For example, we'd love for the BMXers to post more events and help grow awareness of their sport. Same for the triathlete/multi-sport crowd. Some portals such as Gravel are fairly new and the number of tags haven't caught up with the older portals. See below for the portals. Each portal is like a mini-site that shows you all the information for the portal you wish to view without sifting through all the other types of posts.

Advocacy(2,331) BMX(68) Charity(1,643) Commuting(1,005) Culture(3,618) Cyclocross(861) Destination(2,096) Education(886) Gravel(260) MountainBike(1,773) Other(1,531) Party(3,835) Race(2,052) Recreation(5,505) Road(2,343) Road(Competitive)(1,325) Team/Club(1,895) Touring(1,112) Tourism(1,453) Trails(5,361) Training/Fitness(1,723) Tri/Multi-Sport(454)

A shared event calendar like BIKEIOWA's calendar shows which days are taken by events and which ones are open. You'd be amazed how many cyclists plan their weekends and vacations around the BIKEIOWA calendar. We still strive for 800-1,100 listed events a year.

We decided a few years ago that BIKEIOWA will only promote events that are listed on our event calendar. We know the event layout information is consistent with what our viewers want to see.

Some events are only being posted to Facebook these days, and that's OK, but... we are not going to scour Facebook looking for missing events as our time is better spent doing other things. Also note, that we no longer post other's events. The event calendar is service for YOU as a user and as an event promoter. YOU can enter your event and then we will help promote it. It's as simple as that.

Social media platforms are some hard competition with websites these days, but we believe that BIKEIOWA's event calendar, news, features and reviews are worth-while causes to keep updated. We realize not everyone is on social media and if they are, they are most likely inundated with data and only see half of the pertinent posts anyways. BIKEIOWA not only shows consistent data for upcoming events, but also past events are easily found too. BIKEIOWA averages over a million views annually.

We are looking forward to our 20th year in 2021.

Monthly highlights

Without all the structured events were able to explore the parks and take off-the-beat roads to explore Iowa's hidden gems. We are pretty impressed with the monthly activities we were able to achieve while holding ourselves to a high level of social distancing.

These are the events we attended or were scheduled to attend. This does not include the countless solo rides we rode. We BIKEIOWA. Do YOU?

JAN