With no small expenditure of will I kept myself from looking at monthly statistics for my blogs through January. I didn’t look partway through the month or try to project what my readership might be; I tried to just let it be what it was and not worry.
It all … wasn’t so bad. There were, says WordPress, 998 pages viewed here in January. That’s surely not going to make me feel pained that I didn’t log out and click refresh on my pages twice or something. Anyway, that’s up a tiny bit from December (954), and down from the November madhouse that was mostly caused by Apartment 3-G spillover (1,215 views). For what it’s worth, my 2015 average was 31 page views a day; January saw an average of 32. So, no big changes there. There were 523 unique visitors, up from December’s 449 and even November’s 519. I think this unique visitor count might be a record but WordPress doesn’t give me data more than a year old. So I can’t be sure.
The number of likes, which has to be a measure of reader involvement, was down to 202. It had been at 245 in December and 220 in November. It was as high was 518 in June, but that was the month I posted something (nearly) every day, part of the Summer A To Z project.
And speaking of the Summer A To Z project, I’m planning on the very different concept of a Winter A To Z project. Have requests for mathematical or mathematics-linked terms for me? Please pop over there and add one or more in the comments. (If all the requests go to the same comment thread it’ll be easier for me to lose the whole batch at once, instead of post-by-post.)
The most popular posts, for a change, weren’t dominated by the Reading the Comics series. Instead we had:
- Spaghetti Mathematics, reblogging a probability question that combines people’s love of triangles with their love of breaking up spaghetti.
- Another Reasoning Puzzle From ChefMongoose that’ll let you get into his locker at work.
- Reading the Comics, January 15, 2015: Electric Brains and Klein Bottles Edition and then another Reading the Comics post, omitted for clarity.
- Gilded Ratios, me being grumpy about the Golden Ratio by pointing out other interesting numbers that look like their reciprocals.
- Any Requests? my still-open appeal for stuff I could do in the next A To Z Glossary. See above.
The United States, as ever, sent me more page views — 600 — than any other country. Next, with 54, was Hong Kong, which I don’t think has ever sent me so many readers. The United Kingdom gave me 51 page views, and both Germany and Canada had 35 apiece. Austria had 28. India, Singapore, and Poland each sent twelve, but I have to say Singapore wins that on a per-capita basis.
My single-reader countries this time were Bangladesh, Cyprus, Czech Republic, the European Union, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden. Bangladesh, Czech Republic, the European Union, Ireland, and Nigeria were all there in December, too. The European Union is on a two-month streak, and Nigeria a four-month streak.
Search terms? We all like those, right? Among the ones bringing people here were:
- frank and ernest jan 5, 2016
- funny spring comic
- origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe.
- eighth grade math rule where y always goes up by plus 2
- unscramble talafo
- creative form of right angle triangle sketches
I have no idea what that “eighth grade math rule” might mean and I’d appreciate suggestions. Maybe whoever was looking for it will come back once somebody knows.
nebusresearch 
I like your search topics! Mine are invariably Unknown! :)
Don’t stress about the stats. They really don’t mean anything.
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Thank you. Sadly Google started doing something with its search terms that keeps WordPress from being able to tell us what sends people to WordPress. The logic of how they can find things without knowing what they are escapes me, but Google and WordPress probably know what they’re doing, and it’s awful. But that does mean most of my search terms are really Unknown. I just grab at what’s left.
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I think this applies to the views too! My daughter was explaining it to me once – but I forgot! :)
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Oh, yes, there does seem to be something mysterious about the page view count. Especially since the great collapse in viewing numbers last year. I don’t know what the answer might be, besides of course not to worry too much about the exact numbers.
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haha You’re right! :)
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I think that when people view your blog through some kind o faggregate readr like Digg, it does not show up as a page view. So, you might have more readers than you think you have.
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That’s quite possible. And if there are people reading by RSS feed I don’t know of them, or how to count them.
Ultimately I can’t take these numbers to be exact. They’ll serve as a proxy for my actual readership figures. I imagine the fraction of readers coming by undetected methods is probably about constant. I’m hoping mostly to get more interested readers and, ideally, commenters who like talking to one another as much as to me. (And to hope that they do like talking to me.)
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The idea behind Google hiding their search terms was to keep 3d parties (ISPs, the NSA) from finding out what people were searching for. I agree it makes blog statistiques less useful though.
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I hate to seem more cynical than I am, but it does feel to me that Google’s real concern was that some other advertising service might find out what people were searching for. It takes special programming skill to make every ad on every page someone visits be for the thing they just bought two days ago.
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The “eighth grade math rule” might be something like the “Rule of 3” or one of those old terms for basic algebra.
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That might be. I wonder also if it could be someone was looking for Common Core expectations and I just happened to have a blog in the conceptual area.
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