Start of the month, so, it’s time to review my readership numbers. July was not as busy a month as June. I expected that. With the wrap-up of the A To Z glossary there were fewer posts in July than in June, and one can expect people to come to read posts. There weren’t that many fewer — 24 posts in July, versus 28 in June — but every bit counts.
So the number of page views dropped from 1,051 in June to 863 in July. The number of unique visitors rose, though, from 367 up to 415. The 415 visitors equals that in May. Is this a matter of just fewer posts? Perhaps. The number of views per posting dropped from 37.5 in June to 36.0 in July; that seems near enough identical. The number of unique visitors per posting rose from 13.1 in June to 17.3 in July, though.
What makes this interesting is these ratios for May. That month had 936 views, 415 visitors, and a scant twelve posts published. That implies 78 views per post, and 34.6 viewers per post. This seems to suggest the best readership-per-effort involvement is not necessarily daily.
The number of Likes received was down, too, from 518 in June to 382 in July. That’s my second-best on record, though. The number of likes per posting dropped from 18.5 to 16.0, which still seems probably about the same. The May ratio was 21.6 likes per posting. The number of comments dropped insignificantly, from 114 in June to 100 in July. The comments-per-posting rose from 4.1 to 4.2, no way a meaningful change. Though, still, in May, with 84 comments and twelve posts, I had a comments-per-posting ratio of 7.
This might suggest I’m best off posting every other day, or maybe even every third day, rather than going for a daily or near-daily schedule.
The greatest number of visitors came as ever from the United States, with 502. Canada sent the next-greatest number, 61 viewers. The United Kingdom came in third at 41. Italy was fourth, at 39 views, and the Philippines 37. I’m glad to have these readers, though I don’t know what’s got me interested in Italy and the Philippines. India sent me 14 viewers, down from June’s 15. Nobody’s listed as being from the European Union, although individual countries within it have a bunch of readers.
Single-reader countries for July were: Albania, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Mexico, Nepal, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates. Czech Republic is the only country that was also a single-viewer country last month.
The most popular posts over July were, if we can trust WordPress’s statistics:
- Reading the Comics, April 20, 2015: History of Mathematics Edition
- Reading the Comics, July 4, 2015: Symbolic Curiosities Edition
- Reading the Comics, July 24, 2015: All The Popular Topics Are Here Edition
- Reading the Comics, July 19, 2015: Rerun Comics Edition
- A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: tensor
- Lewis Carroll Tries Changing The Way You See Trigonometry
- A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: ring
There’s no search term poetry again, alas, although a few things came up. Among them:
- bloom county 2015 (something I don’t think I ever mentioned, but six people came here looking for it)
- susan from between friends (Between Friends is one of the comic strips regularly featured around here)
- origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe.
- comics strip for sum of difference of two binomials (are there any?)
- chain rule card sort (not sure what this means, but I’m intrigued)
- math statistics of the 80s (again, not sure what this means)
I start the month with a total of 26,734 views, and alongside that 1,946 comments. I expect the 2,000th comment to come sometime in August. I’m curious what it’ll be.
And then to remind people to read my blog, in a post on my blog. There’s this “Follow Blog via Email” link that, at least in the P2 Classic theme I’m using right now, is over on the upper right of the page. You can do that. If you have an RSS reader, https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ will give you posts. https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ will give you comments, although that’s got to be a baffling feed. And my regular old Twitter account is @Nebusj. Thanks for existing and all that.
nebusresearch 
While it’s great fun looking at the stats, I really don’t think they are accurate any more (if they ever were.) Mine are all over the place and I know I have visitors, because they like and comment, but some never appear as a hit (must be in stealth mode!) Still your 2000th comment should be fun. :)
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Certainly something has gone awry with WordPress’s statistics and I expect it’s connected to the stumbling rolling-out of new features like the Reader that doesn’t quite work and the stats page that hides statistics from us. But this is the only data I have available. And I’m willing to suppose that there’s at least a rough correspondence between what WordPress says and what really is there. If, say, WordPress is routinely dropping 20 percent of page visits, then at least growth trends can be made out.
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Yes, there is that with trends as opposed to actual values. But as you pointed out some time back, there was a definite dip in views around April, when WP presumably stopped counting something! I can’t help it tho, numbers just speak to me! So I’ll still watch them. :)
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I can’t resist watching the numbers either, even if it’s not perfectly meaningful. I suppose the April Mystery is good at least for reminding us that there is an unavoidable difference between what is true and what we measure, and we mustn’t look for more precise information than we can get.
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Ah therein lies the rub! I Want more precise information!! haha :)
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I wonder if I could put together an app that just gave out random numbers as the metrics for all kinds of social media. it could be all the fun of precise information without the worry that, like, the numbers doing badly indicating you’re doing anything wrong.
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haha I wonder would anyone notice the difference? :)
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Oh, that’d be interesting to learn.
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I wonder where my clicks went? Perhaps my ad blockers are to blame…
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I don’t think they could be quite so vengeful as to remove clicks from folks who use ad blockers. I mean, they would if it were possible, but I don’t see that it is.
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As far as I remember, they need (or needed?) a script to check the clicks – so it is not just parsing the web server’s log file. You see the browser try to access a ‘statistics’ URL, and it looks similar to accessing the ‘ad’ server. I once tried with Tor browser which prevented the script to run as well, and no clicks were recorded.
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