By the Numbers: A Morning Chalk Up Year in Review
The last (almost) 365 days have been nothing short of action-packed in the CrossFit community. And as the chief team that covers the sport, we’ve had a blast (and maybe a few too many cups of coffee) keeping you up to speed over the last 12 months. To wrap up a fantastic 2022, we thought we’d give you a little insight to the news we brought you all year long about the stories, athletes, volunteers, heroes and everything in between within the functional fitness ecosystem.
Largely in part to fantastic sponsors, industry-leading brands and Partner Events that help power Morning Chalk up, we sent 260 editions of the free newsletter — totaling 19,000,000 emails.
As you may notice, our newsletter directs readers to our website, where they can dive deeper into storylines and related topics. Just over 3-million of you popped over to morningchalkup.com at one point or another — 210,000 of those being on August 4th (day two of the 2022 NOBULL CrossFit Games).
Bringing you at least four stories per day is no easy feat, so internally we added two writers to the team (welcome Teaganne Finn and Joey Adduci!), and we also brought on columnists like Mark Agnew and Tracy Tucker. Almost 50 individual journalists contributed to our written content, collectively producing about 1,600 articles (Emily Beers clocking the most on the team).
In 2021 we launched our Community blogging platform, which brought almost 400 pieces of original, audience-created content to functional fitness fans around the world this year alone.
There’s rarely a shortage of news in this sport, but there are two headlines in particular that garnered the most attention: perhaps not surprisingly, Dave Catro’s exodus, and return, to CrossFit, Inc.
- BREAKING: CrossFit Fires Dave Castro had over 155,000 views and stands as our most read article from the year
- Fittingly, BREAKING: Dave Castro Returns to CrossFit on June 8th follows as our second most-read article
The Castro interest carried over to social, making the same stories our two most talked about posts in 2022. Dave Castro being let go was shared almost 18,000 times, and Dave Casto’s back almost 17,000 times.
We added 33,000 new faces to our IG followers this year, and the Dani Speegle fans are coming in hot: Speegle winning her first CrossFit Games event collected just under 34,000 likes. Dave’s return to CrossFit followed closely behind, with Rich’s retirement from team competition fittingly also on the podium to round out the top three liked posts — an impressive feat among almost 1,300 posts in total on @morningchalkup.
The social traction carried over to our YouTube channel; can you guess which interview got over 450,000 views? Find out and get the full list of our 10 most viewed videos of the year here.
Internally, Kelly Sekulovski joined us on the business operations front, Joe Genetin-Pilawa (Editor) returned to the team, Lauren Kalil became full-time as Senior Producer of Multimedia, and Preslie Hirsch also joined the squad — first as a support associate, then as a part-time writer, and eventually full-time as Senior Content Manager in the fall.
Even the best analysts in the game can’t possibly quantify the highlights and shoutouts we were able to help echo community-wide. Collectively we all threw down at hundreds of local competitions, gave at least a million fist bumps (don’t fact check that one), and sweat in spaces and with people we hold dear. Subscribers like yourself give us countless ideas, big smiles and fuel to keep pushing forward in this ever-changing industry.
Can’t help but wonder how much chalk we all went through…
See you in 2023, and thanks for being here.
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