How December 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I have not been putting off the regular monthly review of my readership statistics because I didn’t like how they looked. I’ve had things occupying my day and haven’t had time to tend the blog is all. That’s come to a stop now, though, and I can look seriously at how things went around here last month. Later, I hope to do a review of the last year.

So, I don’t like how the readership around here looked. I knew there’d be some falling off, as last year’s A to Z project wrapped up. Fewer posts correspond very well with fewer page views, and fewer unique visitors. I wasn’t expecting the fall-off to be this severe, though. Here’s how it looked.

Bar chart of views per month for the last several years. The bars grow quite large in fall of 2019, with a spike about three times anything else's size for October 2019. They've dropped considerably two months in a row.
Still, the views per visitor of about 1.5 is holding around my average. That’s mediocre enough, isn’t it?

There were only 1,386 page views around here in December. That’s the lowest page views count since July. It’s well below the twelve-month running average of 2,057.1 visitors per month, too. The consoling thing: there were “only” eighteen posts in December. This is 77.0 views per posting, which is well below the average of 114.7 views per posting of the past year. But it’s basically identical to November’s record of 77.8 views per posting, and to September’s 81.5 views per posting. October 2019 is and will long remain an anomaly, unless someone else discovers me in some forum.

There were 909 unique visitors in December, again the smallest number since July. And well below the running average of 1,390.3 unique visitors. Per post, it’s 50.5 visitors, which is again way below the running average of 76.7 visitors per post. But it’s right in line with November’s 52.3 and September’s 46.2 visitors per post.

Still there’s things to be discontent about. There were 44 things liked in December, a mere 2.4 likes given per posting. That’s below the running averages of 69.7 likes per month, and of 4.4 likes per post. And then the most shocking statistics of all: zero comments in the whole month. I can’t find that that’s ever happened before, even in the earliest days of the blog when I would hit refresh to make the place seem busier than it is. The running averages are 16.4 comments per month, and 1.1 per post, and it’s hard to believe how far short of that I fell.

Well, there’s not much for me to do but lick my wounds. And to think about what I want in the blog: do I want a chatty comments section? If so, why? I like writing. But I do seem to not be good at blog conversations. I can either work to be better at that, or I can focus on what I am already enjoying. There are good things to say about both approaches.

There were popular posts in December, no matter how much I wasn’t particularly liked. The five posts most often read in December 2019 were:

All told there were 224 pages, including the home page, that got at least a single view in December. That’s down from November’s 300 and October’s 311. 102 of them got more than a single view, down from 160 and 187 the previous few months. 27 got at least ten views, down from 42 and 52 in recent months. Mm.

There were only 60 countries that sent me any page views in December. That’s down from 94 in November and 116 in October, although it’s getting close to September’s 69. There were 18 single-view countries, down from November’s and October’s 24. Here’s the readership figures for them all:

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in darkest red. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, most of Europe, South Asia, and Australia and New Zealand are in a fairly uniform pink too. There are a smattering of African and South American countries also offering readers.
I like to think I did Australia any bit of good by letting a couple dozen of its residents read about comic strips or other such nonsense given everything they’ve been going through, but I’m not positive this doesn’t reflect some people having left ‘curl’ processes running while they were out dealing with the fire crises.
Country Readers
United States 875
India 62
Philippines 58
Australia 55
Canada 47
United Kingdom 35
Germany 28
Brazil 23
Finland 13
Italy 13
Singapore 13
France 10
Denmark 9
Sweden 9
Israel 8
Belgium 7
Mexico 7
Bangladesh 6
Indonesia 6
Netherlands 6
Pakistan 6
Romania 6
Turkey 6
Russia 5
Spain 5
Switzerland 5
Thailand 5
Poland 4
South Africa 4
South Korea 4
Belize 3
Japan 3
New Zealand 3
Portugal 3
Chile 2
Colombia 2
Egypt 2
Nigeria 2
Serbia 2
Taiwan 2
Ukraine 2
Vietnam 2
American Samoa 1
Belarus 1
Bolivia 1
Bulgaria 1
Czech Republic 1
Georgia 1
Greece 1
Ireland 1
Jordan 1 (*)
Kenya 1
Kuwait 1
Latvia 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Norway 1
Oman 1
Saudi Arabia 1
Slovakia 1
Sri Lanka 1 (*)

Jordan and Sri Lanka were the only single-view countries in November, and neither of them was a single-view country in October too.

In December I had 18 posts. These had a total of 8,842 words, for an average of 491.2 words per posting. I’m surprised there’s so few of them too. This is obviously quite below the year’s average of 861 words per posting. December did a fair bit at bringing my words-per-post count down, too. December ended with my having written 201 posts over the whole year, my second-greatest number ever. And 173,087 words in total, my third-most-verbose year. I’ll get into the statistics for the full year in the look back at all 2019 that I mean to write soon. But 861 words per posting is the median of my words-per-posting average, so far.

From the dawn of time to the start of 2020 I’d had 1,403 posts around here. They drew a total of 97,577 views, from 52,978 logged unique visitors.

If you’d like to read these posts regularly, please do. You’ve already gotten much of the way there. If you have a WordPress account you can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of this page to have it appear in your Reader regularly. If you have an RSS reader — and a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal will give you one, by the way — you can add the feed at https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to it. And, as I’ve warned, my Twitter account @Nebusj posts announcements of things as they’re published. But I haven’t had the spoons to figure out how to actually get at it myself, so it’s not a way to chat with me. I’m not sure what is a way to chat with me. Ask my parents what it’s like.

Nevertheless, thank you for reading, however it is you do it, and however often you do it.

Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

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