Motorcycle.com's Most Read Reviews of 2020

At Motorcycle.com, we do everything we can to get our greasy mitts on the latest and greatest motorcycling has to offer throughout the year. That includes shootouts, gear testing, and single motorcycle reviews. Even in a year as fraught with challenges as 2020, our staff continued to work hard, actually doubling our normal content generation during the first half of the COVID-induced lockdowns. The self-isolating nature of motorcycling also made it easier for us to continue with business as usual when it came to testing and shooting in order to keep fresh content flowing to Motorcycle.com.

Most of the time it’s rewarding – if not thought-provoking at least – to crack open the analytics at the end of the year to see what our audience was most interested in. When we first scanned the raw data, the top five motorcycle reviews based on pageviews to date showed a couple of apparent trends. Even when we looked back to average monthly views – in order to better level the parameters between reviews that had been up for 10 months versus newer ones – there are still two trends that were indisputable. You folks like small bikes, and almost anything orange.

So, which reviews for 2020 received the most attention to date? A bunch of KTMs… and one Yamaha.

That data was particularly sweet to see, considering the folks who commented recently to let us know that they were tired of seeing KTMs in our MOBOs. It would seem the vast majority of our audience is quite happy seeing KTMs grace the site throughout the year. It was also pleasant – and not entirely surprising – to see that our audience had as much interest as it did in the 2020 KTM 890 Duke R considering it just won our MOTY award.

The popularity of Yamaha’s Triple-powered motorcycles makes the inclusion of the XSR900 not terribly surprising as well. While Yamaha didn’t release a revised version of the MT-09 or XSR900 during the 2020 testing season, they’ve been very popular motorcycles for some time now, and given the data, the interest hasn’t waned.

After taking a look at the raw numbers above, we were curious to see how the top five motorcycle reviews would shake out if we considered average monthly views rather than just views to date. Considering the 2020 KTM 1290 Super Duke R story was published in February and the new 200 Duke managed to make the list after being published just a few months ago, this new criteria was sure to shake things up, right? Yes and no, actually.

The small displacement and/or orange trend continues. It’s entirely possible the interest in the lower displacement motorcycles on Motorcycle.com skews toward markets where these machines are more prevalent, of course. We are, after all, an international world-renowned source of motorcycle information (ha!). Anyone who has fiddled with data can understand the fun and insight it can provide. There is also the other side of things where it turns into a slippery, time-consuming, bottomless rabbit hole.