I’m getting back to normal. And getting to suspect WordPress just isn’t sending out “Fireworks” reports on how the year for my blog went. Fine then; I’ll carry on. Going back to the Official WordPress statistics page and sharing it for whatever value that has we find that … apparently I just held November 2016 all over again. Gads what a prospect.
As ever I exaggerate, and as ever, not by much. There were 956 page views from 589 distinct readers in December. In November there were 923 page views from 575 distinct readers. There were 21 posts in December, compared to 21 posts in November. Both are up from October, 907 page views from 536 visitors, although that was a nice and easy month with only 13 posts published. I’m a little disappointed to fall under a thousand page views for four months running, but, like, I tried posting stuff more often. What else can I do, besides answer comments the same year they’re posted and chat with people on their blogs? You know?
There were 136 pages liked in December, down from November’s 157 and up from October’s 115. Comments were down to 29 from November’s 35, and while that’s up from October’s 24 I should point out some of January’s comments are really me answering December comments. I had a lot of things slurping up time and energy. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to count the comments I wrote in January as anything other than January’s comments, though.
According to Insights, my most popular day for reading is Sunday, with 17 percent of page views coming then. I expected that; Sunday’s been the most popular day the last few months. It’s only slightly most popular, though. 17 percent (18 percent last month) is about what you’d expect for people reading here without any regard for the day of the week. 6 pm was the most popular hour, barely, with 9 percent of page views then. That’s the hour I’ve settled on for posting stuff. But that hour’s down from being 14 percent of page views in November. I don’t know what that signifies.
My roster of countries and the page views from them looks like this. I’m curiously delighted that India’s becoming a regular top-five country.
| Country | Views |
|---|---|
| United States | 587 |
| United Kingdom | 61 |
| India | 47 |
| Canada | 44 |
| Germany | 25 |
| Austria | 22 |
| Slovenia | 15 |
| Philippines | 13 |
| Netherlands | 10 |
| Spain | 9 |
| Australia | 9 |
| Italy | 7 |
| Puerto Rico | 7 |
| Finland | 6 |
| Norway | 6 |
| Singapore | 6 |
| France | 5 |
| Ireland | 5 |
| Switzerland | 5 |
| Indonesia | 4 |
| Sweden | 4 |
| Thailand | 4 |
| Bahrain | 3 |
| Barbados | 3 |
| Estonia | 3 |
| Israel | 3 |
| Turkey | 3 |
| Chile | 2 |
| Greece | 2 |
| New Zealand | 2 |
| Nigeria | 2 |
| Peru | 2 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Sri Lanka | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Belgium | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 (*) |
| Egypt | 1 |
| European Union | 1 |
| Japan | 1 (**) |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Lebanon | 1 |
| Luxembourg | 1 |
| Nepal | 1 |
| Pakistan | 1 |
| Romania | 1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 (**) |
| Slovakia | 1 |
| South Africa | 1 (**) |
There’s 50 countries altogether that sent me viewers, if we take “European Union” as a country. That’s up from November’s 46. There were 15 single-view countries, the same as in November. Denmark was a single-view country last month. Japan, Saudia Arabia, and South Africa are on three-month single-view streaks. “European Union” is back after a brief absence.
For the second month in a row none of my most popular posts were Reading the Comics essays. They instead were split between the A To Z, some useful-mathematics stuff, and some idle trivia. The most popular stuff in December here was:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side? (yes, someday I will do something about improving that picture)
- What Do I Need To Pass This Class? (December 2016 Edition) which pointed to the number-four entry, and which got ten fewer views so …
- The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Weierstrass Function (more popular than I’d have guessed!)
- What Do I Need To Pass This Class? … now you know the penalty for making people click just one more time.
- The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Tree whose popularity surprises me.
- The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Voronoi Diagram which I’m listing because I’ve got an amusing thing to share next week that should reference this.
There weren’t many specific search terms; most were just “unknown”. Of the search terms that could be known I got this bunch that started out normal enough and then got weird.
- comics strip of production function
- comics of production function theory
- comics about compound event in math
- comics trip math probability
- example of probability comics trip
- population of charlotte nc 1975
- a to z image 2017
- mathematics dark secrets
I, um, maybe have an idea what that last one ought to find.
January starts with my mathematics blog having gotten 44,104 page views total from 18,889 distinct known visitors. That’s still a little page view lead on my humor blog, but that’s going to be lost by the start of February. My humor blog’s been more popular consistently the several months, and the humor blog got some little wave of popularity the past couple days. Why should it have had that? My best guess: I’m able to use that platform to explain what’s going on in Judge Parker, which I can’t quite justify here. Maybe next month.
If you’d like to follow my mathematics blog, please, click the buttons in the upper-right corner of the page to follow the blog on WordPress or by e-mail. You can also find me on Twitter as @nebusj where I try not to be one of those people who somehow has fifty tweets or retweets every hour of the day. But I haven’t done any livetweeting of a bad cartoon in ages. Might change.
nebusresearch 
Nice number of United States views!
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Thank you. I’m always surprised by how the numbers concentrate in a particular region. I’d naively expect to be about equally read anywhere in the English-speaking world, although perhaps my heavy focus on United States-syndicated comic strips does something to attract more United States readers and shoo off non-US-audiences. It’s a curious effect, anyway.
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I have a similar case, most of my viewership (90% in fact) is from Singapore even though 70%-80% of my content should be considered country-neutral.
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Yeah, the country links are weird. I would understand time-zone-based links; something that appears at 3 am local time is not going to be read nearly as much as the same thing at 3 pm. So with most of my mathematics posts here appearing in late-morning/early-afternoon United States time, and early-evening European time, I would expect more chances for readers there. But that there seem to be correlations across national boundaries even for places that haven’t got time zone differences is weird: why not as many Hong Kong readers as Singaporean ones? Or shouldn’t India’s large English-reading audience balance out a couple hours’ difference in time zone? Something I don’t understand is going on here.
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Have you tried Google Webmasters? There is a way to set your website’s target location (they call it geotargeting). It didn’t work much for me, but it is worth a try.
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I have not! I haven’t even thought about it, actually, but it’s worth at least investigating. I suppose that insofar as I have a location the United States is fair enough; my comic strip posts are irredeemably America-centric. But I’d like other people to feel welcome around here.
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It would be interesting to see statistics for a large number of WordPress.com blog and about how views have been changed over recent years. More and more blogs are started, but on the other hand the life time of most blogs seems to be alive only for about 1-2 years. Recently somebody ‘from the past’ commented on my blog: He came back to his abandoned blog after a few years and found that I was the only blogger ‘still alive’ from the crowd he once followed.
I think views are not increased significantly if you blog more. E.g. in the last year I had about 1400 views per month – despite I blog only twice a month. Most of the views are generated by a small set of posts, some of them as old as 2012. In 2014 I blogged more than twice as much and had about 30% more views. But this included some pronounced spikes which I attributed to bot-like behavior as the clicks over time were so regular. WordPress support could not confirm this but could not refute it either.
It somehow feels as if an ‘established’ blog is given a certain share of internet attention, and it will not change no matter what you do :-)
Do you see some long-term trend in views per year? Does it correlate with posts per year?
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(… and I wished there would be an editor… ‘ the life time of most blogs seems to be alive’ … one time would have been enough… I guess you know that I mean ;-))
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Oh, yes, understood easily. … It is a little surprising there’s not at least the chance to edit the first five minutes after posting something.
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I admit a part of my posting these numbers is that I’m curious what other people’s readership patterns are like. I’m shameless and happy to admit my actual exact numbers as best as I can know them. But I’d like to know about overall trends. After all, it was only by comparing numbers that we worked out there seems to have been some strange drop like a year and a half ago that we think reflected mobile-device numbers no longer being counted.
The expiration of older blogs is another of those strange phenomena. I mean some free weekend to go through my blog and cut out sites that haven’t updated in, like, two years. But why I should do that I don’t know; if they aren’t posting it isn’t as though they’re crowding out space. Just some sense that my readership list ought to be faintly in touch with what’s current.
I’ve got a few perennial posts. The count of how many grooves are on a record’s side (or, really, how many times the groove intersects a radial line on a record). How to figure what you need on the final. The Arthur Christmas series. The latter two I try to promote at appropriate times, though. Past that it’s usually my comic strip posts that get readers, I suppose because people like to look up when curious mathematics stuff appears in Luann and they wonder if that makes any sense.
Now, my long-term, year-long trends … I’m not sure. I have got five full years (wow) of numbers to work with so I can make something that looks faintly like a linear regression study. Might do that and see if there’s any correlation with post count.
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That is true. For my blog 10% of the posts generate 90% of the views. And unfortunately those 10% are probably the least mathematical of the posts (for instance discussion/information of the Singapore education system). Pareto principle holds true.
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You know, discussions of what are the popular versus the most-worked-on versus the most common posts people have reminds me of something from Walt Kelly’s masterpiece comic strip Pogo. The irascible Porky Pine warned, I think, Pogo, “If the public decides it’s gonna honor you they ain’t gonna let your feelings get in the way.”
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