It’s two days past when I wanted to do my self-inspection, but that’s all right. Better to have a thing done than not. I had another month of decline on the mathematics blog, inexplicable except for my going and vanishing for a week at a time without notice or much interesting content.
I published ten things in May, my quietest month in years. And the number of things I post seems to be the most important thing I can control to encourage readers. Well, I could change the time of day that I post. For several years now I’ve posted everything at 18:00 Universal Time. That’s about 2 pm Eastern Daylight Time, in my home time zone. It’s possible another hour might serve my interests in being read better.
There were 981 page views in May, down from 1,020 in April (twelve posts) and 1,391 in March (fourteen posts). It’s the first time I didn’t break a thousand since December 2017 (another eleven-post month). The number of unique visitors rose slightly, though: 721 unique visitors in May, compared to 668 in April and 954 in March. (December 2017 had 599 unique visitors.) There is probably a great deal of fluctuation in all this.
The number of likes continued to be erratic. 43 things were liked here in May, up from April’s 40, down from March’s 97. For what it’s worth the twelve-month running average leading up to May was 72 likes per month. This was an unliked month. The number of comments had one of its sporadic upticks, with 12 comments. There’d been 14 in April and a near-record-low four in March. Again for what it’s worth the twelve-month running average is 25 comments per month. That range does include some of the A To Z months, which invite comments in a way I don’t seem to be able to do normally.
163 different posts got at least one view in May. The ones that got the most were a couple perennials and one that I figured to be liked, for how many words I put into it:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
- Reading the Comics, May 16, 2019: Two and Two Edition
- Why I’ll Say 1/x Is A Continuous Function And Why I’ll Say It Isn’t
The record grooves and the trapezoids people always ask about. I figured a nice meaty question like the continuity of a familiar function would get readers. What’s always a bit of a surprise is which Reading the Comics post gets the most readers in a month. Generically I’d expect something posted early in the month. For it to be one that posted the 19th? A bunch of people really like Frank and Ernest. That’s the only explanation.
There were 61 countries or country-like organizations to send me readers in May. There had been 54 countries for April and 59 for March. This past month 16 of them were single-reader countries. In April there were also 16 single-reader countries; in March, 17. Here’s the full roster:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 665 |
| India | 34 |
| Canada | 33 |
| United Kingdom | 31 |
| Australia | 19 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 14 |
| Germany | 13 |
| Mexico | 10 |
| France | 8 |
| South Korea | 8 |
| Nepal | 7 |
| New Zealand | 7 |
| Poland | 7 |
| Singapore | 7 |
| South Africa | 7 |
| Sweden | 7 |
| Chile | 6 |
| Denmark | 6 |
| Italy | 6 |
| Pakistan | 5 |
| Spain | 5 |
| Colombia | 4 |
| Panama | 4 |
| Slovenia | 4 |
| Algeria | 3 |
| Belize | 3 |
| Brazil | 3 |
| Egypt | 3 |
| Malaysia | 3 |
| Netherlands | 3 |
| Argentina | 2 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2 |
| China | 2 |
| Finland | 2 |
| Greece | 2 |
| Guam | 2 |
| Hungary | 2 |
| Ireland | 2 |
| Israel | 2 |
| Jamaica | 2 |
| Morocco | 2 |
| Norway | 2 |
| Peru | 2 |
| Thailand | 2 |
| Turkey | 2 |
| Austria | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Croatia | 1 |
| European Union | 1 (*) |
| Fiji | 1 |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| Indonesia | 1 |
| Japan | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Nigeria | 1 |
| Philippines | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
| Russia | 1 |
| Taiwan | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
The European Union was the only single-reader country-like structure in May to have also been a single-reader place in April. None of the other countries have a streak going. Whoever my lone reader was in Jordan left after five months. The block of readers from Sweden has also dissipated but not disappeared altogether.
This year through the start of June I published 59 posts. This had a total of 57,871 words. This was 11,194 words published in May alone, for an average 1,119 words per post that month. My year-to-date average is 981 words per post. I’d been averaging 953 words per post at the start of May.
Through the start of June there’ve been 264 total likes of posts around here, an average of 4.5 likes per posting. That’s the same average likes per posting as the start of May saw. There’ve been a total of 91 comments, an average of 1.5 comments per posting. I notice, too, that this implies 17 comments in May, while the statistics panel I get claimed there were 12 comments in May. I think the discrepancy reflects pingbacks, one of my own posts referencing another. To verify this would need minutes of looking over the comments received here, though. So it’s sad to think of how this will never be done.
As of the start of June I’d posted 1,261 things here. They had a total of 78,957 page views from a 40,294 recorded unique visitors.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, there’s many ways to do it. One is to add my essays to your RSS reader, whatever that may be. If you do that, I will receive no statistics or logs or anything about your readership. It’ll be your secret. For a less-secret way, you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button, at the upper right corner of this page.
And if you follow me on Twitter as @Nebusj months will start with quality content like the above, of a couple pictures of a rabbit I saw from a parking lot. Thought you might like that.
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