If I had regular readers, one might notice it’s pretty late in the month without my having reviewed readership around here for the past month. This is so. There’s good reason: the first week of August was mostly wiped out by my attending Pinburgh, the world’s largest pinball tournament, and related activities. This included four(!) amusement park visits in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, for some reason, has many amusement parks and they’re all worth a visit.
That’s all time-consuming stuff, though. And it’s not stuff that I can write ahead of time. This offends me, since so much of the structure of these reviews is imposed by the list of what data I have available. I suppose I could do a fill-in-the-blanks template but … why?
Well, here’s the most basic stuff: how many things got views, and how many people came around, in July 2019?
That’s … surprising. I had 11 posts in July, most of them Reading the Comics pieces. But this brought 1,356 page views, above a thousand for the first time since April, and the greatest number of page views since March. It’s even slightly above the twelve-month running average of 1330.6 views per month. There were 870 unique visitors in July, which is almost more than the total number of pages viewed in June. The 870 unique visitors are a fair bit above the twelve-month running average of 822.4 unique visitors per month. By the way, I put together a spreadsheet so I can more easily track twelve-month running averages, as well as averages-per-post.
This offers some information I find interesting. By this I mean it’s information I don’t know how to understand. In July there were 11 posts and, on average, 123.3 views per posting. This is not to say each July post got viewed, on average, 123.3 times. It’s that, roughly, every three days there were about 123 pages viewed from my whole catalogue. This average is in line with the twelve-month running average of 121.0 views per posting. It works out to an average 7.1 unique visitors per posting. That’s probably not significantly greater than the 6.7 unique visitors per posting over the previous twelve months.
There were 45 likes given to things in July. That’s down from the previous twelve-month average of 62.3 per month. There were 21 comments in July, basically the twelve-month average of 23.1 comments per month. This is 6.4 likes per posting, compared to the twelve-month average of 8.8. It’s also 3.3 comments per posting, which is basically the twelve-month average of 3.6. Incidentally, my twelve-month average had been 14.3 posts per month. This is helped by some A to Z sequences, which I haven’t yet done this year.
There may be something else helping my readership. Because of scheduling needs I’d put some of my big Reading the Comics posts to publish on Tuesday, rather than Sunday. I did read a site claiming that WordPress posts got the most readership when posted Tuesday through Thursday. I do not know the methodology of this research. Nor whether it’s still valid, since the post also talked about when Google+ posts were most effective. But this is the only thing I did all that different in July. Maybe I’ll keep that going another month or two and see if it makes a noticeable difference.
192 different posts got at least one page view in July. That’s up from the 158 in June and 163 in May. I don’t have twelve-month running averages for this. But here were the most popular posts:
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System
- Reading the Comics, July 20, 2019: Heat Wave Marginalia Edition
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
- Reading the Comics, July 20, 2019: What Are The Chances Edition
I’d had 99 posts get a single view each, by the way.
WordPress tells me that 64 countries or country-like entities sent me at least a single reader in July. 54 had in June and 61 in May. There were 17 single-reader countries for the second month in a row. There had been 16 in May. The roster of countries? It’s this:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 791 |
| Philippines | 103 |
| United Kingdom | 75 |
| India | 64 |
| Canada | 37 |
| Australia | 34 |
| Italy | 18 |
| Brazil | 16 |
| Germany | 16 |
| Singapore | 15 |
| South Africa | 15 |
| France | 10 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 9 |
| Malaysia | 9 |
| Denmark | 8 |
| Colombia | 7 |
| Ireland | 7 |
| Hungary | 6 |
| Mexico | 6 |
| Pakistan | 6 |
| Taiwan | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Argentina | 5 |
| Spain | 5 |
| Sweden | 5 |
| Puerto Rico | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| United Arab Emirates | 4 |
| Finland | 3 |
| Greece | 3 |
| Kenya | 3 |
| Netherlands | 3 |
| Nigeria | 3 |
| Poland | 3 |
| Russia | 3 |
| Slovenia | 3 |
| Tanzania | 3 |
| Ukraine | 3 |
| Bangladesh | 2 |
| Belgium | 2 |
| Ethiopia | 2 |
| Japan | 2 |
| Norway | 2 |
| Slovakia | 2 |
| South Korea | 2 |
| Sri Lanka | 2 |
| Turkey | 2 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| Burundi | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Czech Republic | 1 |
| Egypt | 1 (*) |
| European Union | 1 |
| Fiji | 1 |
| Guam | 1 |
| Israel | 1 (*) |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Nepal | 1 |
| New Zealand | 1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 |
| Serbia | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 (**) |
Egypt and Israel were single-reader countries in June. Vietnam’s been a single-reader country two months running. I’m surprised to have so few New Zealand readers. And I continue to wonder if the Philippines aren’t reading me by some mistake. Again, I’m not one to turn away readers. It’s just that I write a blog here that’s very steeped in contemporary United States culture and I’m surprised anyone else would me relevant.
By the start of August I had published 79 posts on the year, with a total of 77,108 words. 9,656 of those words were published in July. That’s an average of 878 words per post in July. It’s an average 976 words per post for all of 2019 so far. At the start of July my average post for the year had been 992 words.
For 2019 through the start of August I’d recorded 348 likes, an average of 4.4 likes per posting. That’s slightly down from the start of July’s 4.5 likes per posting. There’d been 136 comments recorded, an average of 1.7 comments per posting. That’s an increase from the average 1.5 comments per posting logged at the start of July. But that count includes some pingbacks, the bits where one post refers to another.
As of the start of August I’ve posted 1,281 things to this blog. They had recorded 81,223 page views, from a logged 41,759 unique visitors.
If you’d like to be a regular reader I’d be glad to have you. There’s a “Follow Nebusresearch” button in the upper right corner of this page. Clicking it will add my posts to your WordPress Reader. If you don’t want to read through WordPress, you can use any RSS reader you like. The feed is https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ and please use it.
I’m @nebusj on Twitter, and each post gets an announcement there. It also gets announcements of my humor blog’s posts. Those might not be to your taste, but, you don’t know for sure until you read some. And I do at least try to start the month with rabbit pictures.
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