So, that wasn’t as bad as September. Last month I began my review of readership with the sad news I’d lost about a fifth of my readers from August. I haven’t got them all back yet. But the number of page views did rise to 733 in October. It’s just a bit over September’s 708, but that’s an improvement. That’s a good trend. But I do notice there was a little readership rise between July and August, and then the bottom dropped out. And 733 is still fewer than the number of readers my humor blog got from just people trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with the comic strip Apartment 3-G. (Nothing is happening in Apartment 3-G and the rumor is the strip’s been cancelled.)
The number of unique visitors rose, from 381 to 405. That’s only the eighth-highest result of the past twelve months. But it is only a little below the twelve-month average. (If you’d like to know: the 12-month mean number of visitors was 419.55, and standard deviation 39.715, so there you go. The median was 415.)
The number of likes rose again, from September’s absolutely unpopular 188 to a tolerable 244. That’s a little below the twelve-month mean (266.91) and twelve-month median (259), although given the standard deviation is 107.71 that’s hardly anything off the average.
The number of comments rose to 47, which looks good compared to September’s 25, but is nothing compared to the glory days of August and its 95 and the like. That’s farther below the twelve-month mean of 68.9 and median of 64 (standard deviation of 30), but, eh. I’ll take signs of hope. I maybe need to publicize more of my better material, more often.
Countries sending me readers have been the United States with 387 page views, the United Kingdom with 55, the Canada with 48, the Austria with 33, and the Philippines with 25. India only offered fourteen page views; Singapore, nine. The European Union got listed with five.
Single-reader countries for October were Belgium, Czech Republic, Georgia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay. Repeats from September on that list are Saudia Arabia and Uruguay. None of the countries are on a three-month streak.
Among the most popular posts the past month were, of course, Reading the Comics surveys. To avoid flooding the list of what’s popular I’ll just list the category for Comic Strips instead.
- Reading the Comics, an ongoing series.
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw which hasn’t made the top-five or top-ten in a couple months. Curious.
- The Set Tour, Part 6: One Big One Plus Some Rubble and I’m glad to see this series getting a little bit of love. I’m having more fun with this than I’ve had with anything since the Summer A To Z.
- Phase Equilibria and the usefulness of μ, a reblogged post that’s part of my attempt to get people to pay attention to statistical mechanics.
- The Kind Of Book That Makes Me Want To Refocus On Logic, talking about a book I liked. I should probably talk about books I like more.
The search terms were mostly the usual bunch: origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe and otto soglow little king and how fast is earth spinning. Delighting me, although I haven’t got anything to answer it exactly, was +how to start a pinball league. I’ve picked up a couple things about how they work, but that’s kind of outside the mathematics field proper.
nebusresearch 
Interesting to read such a breakdown of visitors. Do you think summer gets more viewers because people have more time? Or are more likely to be relaxing and reading interesting things?
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Well, this summer I had several things working to drive up readership. The biggest one was the A To Z glossary, which gave me three solid, very accessible posts each week. And with my other blog content I was able to post something daily five weeks straight. That’s good for readership anywhere.
Then in August and September I had crunches on my time that kept me from visiting as many other blogs as I had been doing, and from commenting on them. That almost surely caused other bloggers to forget I was there, and to forget to read me. I haven’t really got a commenting community — people talk to me here, but not to one another — so paying visits is an essential part of getting visits.
Fortunately the demands on my time have been letting up and I’m better able to go visit blog-friends again. But I think that this summer’s readership highs really depended on the A-to-Z project. The Set Tour is an imitation of that, although only a once-a-week project. I’m considering doing a ‘Theorem Thursday’ thing, taking some specific theorem and explaining it once a week on an easy-to-remember day, if I don’t just take the easy route and do a Winter A-to-Z.
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