A couple months back I switched to looking at comparing monthly readership figures to a twelve-month running average. Running averages offer some advantages in looking for any signal. They make statistics less sensitive to fluke events. The cost, of course, is that they take longer to recognize trends starting. But in October I had a singular freak event, with the A to Z essay on linear programming getting liked to from some forum vastly larger than mine. So that got an extra 4,900 page views in one day, and an extra six hundred or so the next, and so on. Can’t expect that to be regular, though.
There were a “mere” 2,333 page views around here in November. That’s small only compared to October’s spike. It’s a little down from September, but still, it’s above the twelve-month running average of 1,996.9 views in a month. Those views came from 1,568 unique visitors, which compares nicely to the running average of 1,330.3 views per month.
There were 95 likes given to things around here in November, which is also above the running average of 68.8 likes in a month. And 23 comments, once again above the running average of 17.5 comments. So, posting stuff every single day works; who would have guessed, apart from everyone who knows anything about attracting audiences?
Well, more about posting to a predictable schedule, and stuff that people are interested in. But “just post a lot” can work too.
Or can it? November saw 77.8 views per posting, which is close to what September offered. But both are below the twelve-month running average of 114.0 views per posting. There were 52.3 visitors per posting, down from the average of 75.4 visitors per post. It’s back to around September’s 46.2 visitors per post though. There were 3.2 likes per post, down from the running average of 4.4. And there were 0.8 comments per posting, below the average of 1.1. It all implies there’s a best rate for these things. Or that filling out Fridays and Saturdays with mentions of older posts is not all that engaging.
Counting my home page there were 300 pages that got any views at all in November. There’d been 311 in October and 296 in September. 160 of them got more than one view, a bit undre the 187 of October and 172 of September. 42 posts got at least ten views, down from October’s 52 but comparable to September’s 37. The most popular pieces, meanwhile, were:
- My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Taylor Series
- My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Linear Programming
- How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
- My 2019 Mathematics A To Z: Versine
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw
Nice to see trapezoids back again. Also I’m happy that the versine’s been liked. I’m coming to enjoy this obscure trig function, although not so much as to use it for anything I care about.
94 countries or country-like entities sent me any page views in November. That’s down from October’s 116, and even September’s 69. 24 of these were single-reader countries, the same count as in October and above September’s 19. Here’s the roster of reading lands:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 1,205 |
| India | 172 |
| Philippines | 91 |
| Canada | 89 |
| United Kingdom | 72 |
| Australia | 55 |
| Germany | 50 |
| Finland | 36 |
| Spain | 33 |
| Singapore | 28 |
| France | 25 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 23 |
| Latvia | 22 |
| Mexico | 21 |
| Malaysia | 20 |
| South Africa | 19 |
| Ireland | 16 |
| Italy | 16 |
| Pakistan | 16 |
| Brazil | 15 |
| Sweden | 14 |
| Turkey | 14 |
| Poland | 13 |
| Netherlands | 12 |
| Bangladesh | 11 |
| Indonesia | 10 |
| Norway | 10 |
| Vietnam | 10 |
| Austria | 9 |
| Belgium | 9 |
| Greece | 9 |
| Japan | 8 |
| Ukraine | 8 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Nigeria | 7 |
| Bulgaria | 6 |
| China | 6 |
| Malta | 6 |
| Romania | 6 |
| Switzerland | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Belarus | 5 |
| Colombia | 5 |
| Ecuador | 5 |
| Kenya | 5 |
| New Zealand | 5 |
| Portugal | 5 |
| Taiwan | 5 |
| Egypt | 4 |
| Morocco | 4 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 4 |
| Russia | 4 |
| Serbia | 4 |
| South Korea | 4 |
| United Arab Emirates | 4 |
| Croatia | 3 |
| Czech Republic | 3 |
| Hungary | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 |
| Tanzania | 3 |
| Algeria | 2 |
| Cyprus | 2 |
| El Salvador | 2 |
| European Union | 2 |
| Ghana | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Mongolia | 2 |
| Saudi Arabia | 2 |
| Slovenia | 2 |
| Uganda | 2 |
| Albania | 1 (*) |
| Argentina | 1 |
| Azerbaijan | 1 (*) |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| Brunei | 1 |
| Chile | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 |
| Jordan | 1 |
| Laos | 1 |
| Lithuania | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Marshall Islands | 1 |
| Mauritius | 1 |
| Moldova | 1 |
| Nicaragua | 1 |
| Palestinian Territories | 1 |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
| Rwanda | 1 (*) |
| Somalia | 1 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1 (*) |
Albania, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, and Trinidad & Tobago were single-view countries in October too. No countries are on a two-month single-view streak. The Philippines are back to being among the three countries sending me the greatest number of page views. Hi, whoever there finds me interesting.
From the start of this blog through the start of December I’ve posted 1,385 things. These have drawn a total of 96,191 page views, from 52,069 logged unique visitors, which does not count people from the earliest couple years.
From the start of 2019 to the start of December I’d posted 183 things, putting me one up over all of 2018 already. Only 2015 (188 posts) and 2016 (213 posts) have had more, to date. I’ve had 164,245 words published so far this year, which is also already my third most verbose year on record. 24,185 of these words were posted in November, for an average post of 808 and one-sixth words per posting in November. That’s below the year’s average of 898 words per post. October’s posts averaged 803.8 words, by the way, so apparently I’ve stabilized some.
Tomorrow I hope to post thoughts on what I learned doing the Fall 2019 A to Z sequence, the traditional close of that sort of project. And I do hope to keep up at least one Reading the Comics post per week. Past that, who can say what I’ll do?
If you’d like to know, you can follow me regularly. The easiest way is to add https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal will serve as one: you can add it RSS feeds to your Friends page. If you’ve already got a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Nebusresearch”, a button on the upper right corner of this page. My Twitter account as @Nebusj remains fallow, but still posts announcements, so that hasn’t broken at least.
In any case, thank you for reading, however it is you do it.
nebusresearch 