It’s looking as though WordPress has really and permanently discontinued its year-in-review posts. That’s a shame. They had this animation that presented your year as a set of fireworks, one for each post, paced the same way your posts for the year were. The size of the fireworks explosion corresponded to how much it was liked or drew comments or something. Great stuff. Haven’t seen it in a couple of years. The web washes away everything whimsical.
I can do it manually, at least, looking at the summaries for yearly readership and all that. It’s just a bit different from the monthly reviews. And then I can see what lessons I draw from that, and go on to ignore them all. My impression of 2018 had been that I’d had a mildly better-read year than I had in 2017, but that my comments and likes had cratered. That is, people might find something they wanted to read, but saw no reason to stick around and chat with me, which I understand. But here’s what the data says.
And, for the sake of convenience, let me put things since 2012 — my first full year — in a coherent table.
| Year | Posts Published | Page Views | Unique Visitors | Likes | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 6,094 | 180 | 275* | 97 | 190 |
| 2013 | 106 | 5,729 | 2,905 | 262 | 161 |
| 2014 | 129 | 7,020 | 3,382 | 1,045 | 308 |
| 2015 | 188 | 11,241 | 5,159 | 3,273 | 822 |
| 2016 | 213 | 12,851 | 7,168 | 2,163 | 474 |
| 2017 | 164 | 12,214 | 7,602 | 1,094 | 301 |
| 2018 | 182 | 16,597 | 9,769 | 1,016 | 386 |
The 2012 visitors count doesn’t; they only started keeping track of those numbers (where they’d admit to us) partway through the year.
2015 you can see was a busy year. That’s the first year I did an A-To-Z sequence, and that got a fantastic response. In 2016 I tried two over the year and while neither was as well-received, it did turn out nicely. 2017 and 2018 had a single A-To-Z sequence each. I’m surprised how nearly I track to a post every other day over seven years straight. And I’m surprised that my page-view count grew by about one-third from 2017 to 2018. And that unique visitors grew by about the same amount, and has been except for 2016-to-2017. I’m certainly not doing much to be better about promoting myself, so something else is at work. The evaporating number of likes and comments I can’t explain. It’s looking like 2015 and 2016 were exceptional years, but what was the exception?
I can say what’s popular: posts that tell you how to do something. And, of course, my participation in the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. I hope to do that again this year. The ten most popular things from 2018 were:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121
- A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
- How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler
- Solving The Price Is Right’s “Any Number” Game
- Reading the Comics, March 14, 2016: Pi Day Comics Event
- Theorem Thursday: The Five-Color Map Theorem
- How Dirac Made Every Number
- How To Multiply By 365 In Your Head
Fascinating, to me, is that only one piece (the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival) was posted in 2018. But overall it suggests I should start more pieces with the tag “How to … ”.
122 of the world’s countries sent me any readers at all in 2018. Here they are, and how many came from each, as WordPress organizes them and thinks dubious things like the “European Union” or the “United Kingdom” are countries:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 10,545 |
| Philippines | 803 |
| United Kingdom | 737 |
| Canada | 641 |
| India | 635 |
| Australia | 285 |
| Singapore | 246 |
| Denmark | 199 |
| Turkey | 148 |
| Germany | 122 |
| South Africa | 114 |
| Sweden | 106 |
| Brazil | 105 |
| Slovenia | 105 |
| France | 85 |
| Italy | 83 |
| Netherlands | 72 |
| Spain | 71 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 70 |
| Puerto Rico | 67 |
| European Union | 66 |
| Switzerland | 63 |
| Poland | 62 |
| Austria | 53 |
| Indonesia | 53 |
| New Zealand | 50 |
| Mexico | 45 |
| Ireland | 44 |
| Pakistan | 43 |
| Belgium | 41 |
| Norway | 39 |
| Malaysia | 37 |
| Greece | 36 |
| South Korea | 35 |
| Russia | 29 |
| Algeria | 28 |
| Romania | 27 |
| Israel | 25 |
| Argentina | 24 |
| Kenya | 22 |
| Japan | 21 |
| Czech Republic | 20 |
| Finland | 20 |
| United Arab Emirates | 20 |
| Thailand | 19 |
| Egypt | 18 |
| Vietnam | 16 |
| Ghana | 15 |
| Peru | 15 |
| Portugal | 14 |
| Bangladesh | 13 |
| Nigeria | 13 |
| Croatia | 12 |
| Lithuania | 12 |
| Ukraine | 12 |
| Taiwan | 11 |
| Bulgaria | 10 |
| Bhutan | 9 |
| Brunei | 9 |
| Chile | 9 |
| Serbia | 9 |
| Hungary | 8 |
| Nepal | 8 |
| Saudi Arabia | 8 |
| Slovakia | 8 |
| Belize | 7 |
| China | 7 |
| Kazakhstan | 7 |
| Venezuela | 7 |
| Afghanistan | 6 |
| Morocco | 6 |
| Qatar | 6 |
| Sri Lanka | 6 |
| American Samoa | 5 |
| Colombia | 5 |
| Iraq | 5 |
| Kuwait | 5 |
| Lebanon | 5 |
| Macau SAR China | 5 |
| Mongolia | 5 |
| Albania | 4 |
| Estonia | 4 |
| Georgia | 4 |
| Jamaica | 4 |
| Jordan | 4 |
| Uruguay | 4 |
| Barbados | 3 |
| Costa Rica | 3 |
| Guernsey | 3 |
| Iceland | 3 |
| Latvia | 3 |
| Mauritius | 3 |
| Palestinian Territories | 3 |
| Panama | 3 |
| Cambodia | 2 |
| Cyprus | 2 |
| Ecuador | 2 |
| Laos | 2 |
| Libya | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Namibia | 2 |
| St. Kitts & Nevis | 2 |
| Tanzania | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Armenia | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| El Salvador | 1 |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| Fiji | 1 |
| Gibraltar | 1 |
| Guam | 1 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Malta | 1 |
| Mozambique | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Senegal | 1 |
| Sint Maarten | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
I’m quite surprised to have so many readers from the Philippines and wonder if some peculiar event happened, like a teacher told the school to look at my piece about the number of grooves on a record. I figured to appeal more to countries where English is a primary language, and know I have a strong United States cultural bias. (Quick, name a non-American comic strip that’s ever got into a Reading The Comics post. Time’s up! You were trying to think of Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends.) But the gap in readers per capita between, say, the United States and Canada seems more than I should have expected.
In all, in 2018, I posted 182 things. They came out to 186,612 words overall, for an average of 1,025 words per post. On average posts attracted 5.3 likes, and 2.8 comments. Seems as though I could do more. I don’t really know what.
nebusresearch 
Perhaps the next time you host the carnival, you could give it a title like “how to host the playful mathematics carnival.”
LikeLike
You may have something!
… It puts me in mind of stories of how, in Wall Street of the 1960s, there was the impression that certain words or partial words would automatically increase a stock’s value. Like, Compu- or -Tronic or Data or Info- or the like. So stock brokers would use themselves trying to think of the ultimate company name, with something like CompuDataTronic InfoSystems or the like.
It also reminds me of how in the olden days DC Comics was certain that some elements on comic book covers increased sales, so they parceled out, like, who could have a gorilla on the cover this month, and who could have purple, and who could have a character asking another a question, and everything else that would juice a book’s sales. (Nobody knows why gorillas and purple and questions boosted sales; they just went with what patterns they could find.)
LikeLiked by 1 person