How June 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I’m a little behind my usual review of the month’s readership and what’s popular around here, but I have good reason for it: I was busy earlier this week. Expect to be busy next week, too. Really, it’s going to be a bit of a mad month so do please watch this spot next week when I unleash some extra madness on myself. Thank you.

So. Readers in June 2017: how many did I have? Disappointingly few of them, it turns out. Only 878, down from the 1029 in May and 994 in April. Heck, that’s not even close to what I had been running in previous months. Not sure what happened there. Maybe it’s everybody getting out of (US) schools and not needing comic strips read to them anymore. The number of unique visitors fell too, to 542 down from May’s 662 and April’s 696. It’s not a phenomenon related to the number of things posted, either; I had 13 posts in June versus 12 in May, and 13 in April, and 12 in March, which suggests that July I can take relatively easy, come to think of it. I finally had an uptick in the number of likes, at least, with that rising to 99 from the 78 of May and the 90 of April. I don’t think that’s statistically significant a difference, though. The number of comments also rose, but to only 13; that beats May’s 8, but April only had 16. Well, I have a scheme in mind to increase the number of comments too. You’ll know it when you see it. But, wow, a statistics page like that and I worry that I’ve passed my prime here.

The popular stuff around here was about what I’d expected: the count of grooves in a record, and a bunch of Reading the Comics posts. And then one of the supplemental pieces in my Why Stuff Can Orbit series, which was helped by Elke Stangl’s most gracious words about it. The top articles, since there was a three-way tie for fourth place:

• How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
• What Second Derivatives Are And What They Can Do For You
• Reading the Comics, May 31, 2017: Feast Week Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 3, 2017: Feast Week Conclusion Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 10, 2017: Some Vintage Comics Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 24, 2017: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Edition

Now the roster of the 52 countries that sent me readers in June, and how many each of them did. Spoiler: the United States tops the list.

Country	Views
United States	472
Turkey	74
India	52
United Kingdom	40
Canada	38
Austria	23
Puerto Rico	17
Australia	16
Germany	15
Singapore	12
Brazil	11
China	9
France	7
Italy	7
Slovenia	7
Philippines	5
Norway	4
Spain	4
Switzerland	4
Argentina	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Israel	3
Netherlands	3
New Zealand	3
Russia	3
Sweden	3
Cambodia	2
Chile	2
Indonesia	2
Kenya	2
Malaysia	2
Poland	2
Saudi Arabia	2
South Africa	2
South Korea	2
Thailand	2
Azerbaijan	1
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Belgium	1 (*)
Colombia	1 (*)
Estonia	1
Ghana	1
Hungary	1
Ireland	1
Japan	1 (*)
Jordan	1
Macedonia	1
Mexico	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Portugal	1 (***)
Ukraine	1 (*)

I make that out as readers coming from 52 countries, same as in May and slightly more than there were in April. There were 16 single-reader countries in June, down from May’s 21 and up from April’s 10. Belgium, Colombia, Japan, and Ukraine have been single-reader countries for two months running now. Portugal is on a four-month single-reader streak. Hi, person from Portugal. I’m glad you like me a little bit. That’s better than not at all. I have no idea why I’m suddenly popular in Turkey.

The most popular day for posts was Sunday, with 18 percent of page views. That’s marginally up from 16 percent in May, but the same as April’s count. The most popular hour was 4 pm, when 14 percent of my page views came. I rather suspected that would happen; I tried moving the default posting time two hours earlier this past month and sure enough, the readers followed. People stop in here right after something’s posted or not much at all. Hm.

The mathematics blog started the month with 50,125 page views, so hey, finally broke 50,000! Nice. These came from something like 22,754 distinct viewers that WordPress is aware of existing.

WordPress’s report of what search terms people are looking for has collapsed into uselessness. About all it admits to people wanting in June, besides “unknown search terms”, were Jumble — I want it too, but can’t find a good source that just gives me the day’s puzzle in a static picture — and “concept of pythagorean theorem” and “short conversation to explain algebra”. The Pythagorean theorem I can do, but a short conversation to explain algebra? … Well, which kind of algebra? I suppose they don’t want the fun kinds. They never do.

The Insights panel thinks there are 666 WordPress.com followers to start the month. I can accept that. Not all of them seem to visit, but that might just be that they’re following me in their Readers rather than clicking individual links. I’ve given up on leaving a teaser of text out front and hiding the rest behind a click. That stuff might record, but nobody likes it, me included. If you’d like to follow this blog in your WordPress reader, there’s a little blue strip labelled “Follow nebusresearch” in the upper-right corner of the page. If you’d rather follow by e-mail, it’s under “Follow Blog Via Email” and don’t think I want a – in there. And I am on Twitter as well, as @Nebusj. That account sometimes gets into talking about non-mathematical stuff, including my humor blog which is a slightly more popular hangout, since I regularly explain what’s going on in the story strips. So if you looked at Mary Worth the last couple months and couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on, I can tell you: it’s CRUISE SHIPS. Only in more detail.