I do like doing a year-end recap of my readership. And WordPress seems not to be doing its annual little fireworks spectacular animated gif. This is a shame since this year, for the first time, I had two mathematics posts the same day and that would’ve been nice to see animated. (I had messed up the scheduled posting of one of the Summer 2017 A To Z, and had something else already planned to run that day, and it was either bump something too late or go ahead with two things on the same day.)
So what did readership look like for the whole year?
I published 164 posts in 2017, well down from 2016’s 213. 2016 had two A to Z sequences whereas 2017 had just the one. This was a median year for me. In 2015 I’d published 188 posts, and in 2014 a mere 129. In 2013 there were 106. (In 2012 there were 180, but that count is boosted by an experiment in also posting some space-history stuff that just didn’t fit the main content here.)
12,214 pages viewed over the 2017, which is down from 2016’s 12,851. Not very much, though, especially for how much less stuff I published. It’s a bit higher than 2015’s 11,241. I’m not sure what to make of basically flat numbers of page views over three years. Mostly I suspect, deep down, that not being able to easily read the Jumble puzzles, and occasionally include them in Reading the Comics posts, has hurt my readership and my engagement. If you know a good source for them, please, let me know.
The number of unique visitor has risen steadily, though. 2017 had the greatest number of distinct people stopping by, with 7,602 logged. In 2016 they were 7,168 in number, and in 2015 only 5,159. 2014 saw 3,382; 2013, 2,905 unique visitors. That’s a pretty dramatic growth in unique visitors per published post, a statistic that WordPress doesn’t keep and that’s of significance only because I can keep dividing things until I find some sort of trend line. Still, 2013 through 2015 it’s an almost constant 27 unique visitors per post, and then in 2016 that rose to 33 and then to 46.
The number of likes plummeted to 1,094. 2016 had seen 2,163, and 2015 — the first year I did an A to Z — some 3,273 things were liked. Comments similarly plummeted; there were 301 in 2017. 2016 saw 474, and 2015 some 822. I am not sure what I did right that first A to Z that I haven’t quite recaptured, or built upon.
For all that the 2015 through 2017 were the most-read years of my little blog here, the most popular pieces were from before that. The top five most-read posts were … well, three are ones I would have guessed. The other two surprised me:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
- How Dirac Made Every Number
- Solving The Price Is Right’s “Any Number” Game
- Counting From 52 to 11,108
This at least implies what to do: more polygons and game show riddles. The most popular piece from 2017 was What Would You Like In The Summer 2017 Mathematics A To Z?, my appealing for enough topics to write about for two months straight. (Blogging is never easier than when someone else gives you topics to write about.)
I got visitors from 113 nations of the world, says WordPress, and here they are:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 6973 |
| United Kingdom | 784 |
| India | 547 |
| Canada | 450 |
| Philippines | 442 |
| Singapore | 243 |
| Australia | 194 |
| Austria | 187 |
| Germany | 172 |
| Turkey | 135 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 126 |
| France | 108 |
| Spain | 108 |
| Brazil | 107 |
| Slovenia | 104 |
| Italy | 93 |
| Puerto Rico | 78 |
| Sweden | 72 |
| South Africa | 63 |
| Netherlands | 47 |
| Denmark | 43 |
| New Zealand | 40 |
| Switzerland | 40 |
| Thailand | 37 |
| Ireland | 36 |
| Argentina | 33 |
| Mexico | 31 |
| Israel | 30 |
| Romania | 30 |
| Russia | 30 |
| Belgium | 29 |
| Indonesia | 29 |
| Malaysia | 28 |
| Norway | 26 |
| South Korea | 26 |
| Poland | 25 |
| Japan | 24 |
| Bangladesh | 21 |
| Taiwan | 20 |
| Greece | 18 |
| Oman | 17 |
| US Virgin Islands | 17 |
| European Union | 15 |
| Finland | 15 |
| Portugal | 15 |
| Croatia | 14 |
| Pakistan | 14 |
| Ukraine | 14 |
| China | 12 |
| Colombia | 12 |
| Saudi Arabia | 12 |
| Slovakia | 12 |
| United Arab Emirates | 12 |
| Chile | 11 |
| Czech Republic | 10 |
| Nigeria | 10 |
| Uruguay | 10 |
| Bulgaria | 9 |
| Hungary | 9 |
| Vietnam | 9 |
| Kuwait | 8 |
| Egypt | 7 |
| Estonia | 7 |
| Belarus | 6 |
| Lebanon | 6 |
| Iceland | 5 |
| Jamaica | 5 |
| Nepal | 5 |
| Paraguay | 5 |
| Peru | 5 |
| Serbia | 5 |
| Venezuela | 5 |
| Cambodia | 4 |
| Costa Rica | 4 |
| Iraq | 4 |
| Saint Kitts & Nevis | 4 |
| Albania | 3 |
| Algeria | 3 |
| Armenia | 3 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 3 |
| Cyprus | 3 |
| Kenya | 3 |
| Lithuania | 3 |
| Macedonia | 3 |
| Azerbaijan | 2 |
| Bahrain | 2 |
| Barbados | 2 |
| Ecuador | 2 |
| Georgia | 2 |
| Ghana | 2 |
| Jordan | 2 |
| Kazakhstan | 2 |
| Latvia | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Morocco | 2 |
| Northern Mariana Islands | 2 |
| Qatar | 2 |
| Sri Lanka | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Angola | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Bermuda | 1 |
| Bhutan | 1 |
| Cape Verde | 1 |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| Guam | 1 |
| Madagascar | 1 |
| Maldives | 1 |
| Malta | 1 |
| Palestinian Territories | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Uganda | 1 |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
I understand being more read in countries where English is the primary language. Still seems like I had fewer readers from China than should’ve expected. I remember ages ago someone else (Elke Stangl?) mentioning a curious absence of readers from China and I’m curious whether others have observed this and, if so, what might be going on.
On the insights page WordPress tells me I had a total of 441 comments and 1,043 likes, which does not match what the traffic page was telling me. I wonder if the discrepancy in comments is about whether to count links from one posting to another, which are regarded as comments on the linked page. No idea how to explain the discrepancy in likes, though.
Insights says I got an average of three comments per post in 2017, and an average of six likes per post. At 153,483 words, in total, published that’s 936 words per post, on average. I’m curious what the statistics for earlier years were. I feel like I’m getting more longwinded, at least. (Also with 201,692 words on my humor blog this gives me a bit more than a third of a million words published last year. Not a bad heap of words.)
I am considering getting a proper, individual domain for my blog here. I confess I’ve never quite understood how being off on my own name would encourage more visitors than having a subdomain nestled under the wordpress.com label, but it seems to work for folks like Iva Sallay’s findthefactors.com. (Sallay also has two great hooks, between the puzzles and the lists of factors of whole numbers.) Maybe I just need to poke around it some more until the whole matter becomes irrelevant, and then I can act, wrongly.
nebusresearch 
I cannot remember if I mentioned something about views from China ;-) I feel my clicks from China are content-dependent: the more often and explicitly I mention heat pumps, the more views from China :-)
I had about 13000 views last year – declining about linearly since 2014 where I had ~23000.
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Hm. Well, I remember at one point a couple years ago a few of us chatting about country readership and a surprising void of readers from China. I think at that point I had logged none for the year, possibly ever, and that seemed suspicious.
And, wow, that’s a fearsome decline. I remember also a point where everybody seemed to notice their readership drop to about four-fifths what it had been (I remember mentioning it in a readership-review post, so it should be findable, if I tried). I remember speculation about whether it might be that readers using the WordPress app weren’t being logged, or something like that, but no conclusions. In total readers I can’t make any serious complaint, but can’t seem to do anything about the number of comments or the number of likes clicked, which is a mystery to me.
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