How March 2020 Treated My Mathematics Blog, Finally

And now I can close my books on March 2020. Late? Yes, so it’s late. You know what it’s been like. It was a month full of changes of fate, not least because on the 10th I volunteered to tape the empty slot hosting Denise Gaskins’s Playful Math Education Blog Carnival, and right after that the world ended. Hosting such an event I can expect to bring in new readers, although the trouble organizing things meant I didn’t post until the last day of the month. Still, I could hope to see some readership bump. How did that all turn out?

In March I posted 15 things, which is about as busy as I could hope to manage for a month that’s not eaten up by an A-to-Z sequence. And that for a month when I didn’t feel I could point out my series on information theory as explained by the March Madness basketball tournament. I believe the frequency of my own posting is the one variable in my control that affects my readership numbers. And this looks to be true. There were 2,049 page views here in March. This is a bit below the twelve-month running average of 2,072.3 views, but remember, that figure has the October 2019 spike in it. Take October out of it and the running average was a mere 1,472.7 page views.

Not denying that it’s nice I was ready at exactly midnight, between the 31st of March and 1st of April, Universal Time to catch a screenshot where no April views had been gathered. I’d just rather have been out messing around at the hipster bar where we play pinball Tuesday nights instead.

There were 1,267 unique visitors in March. That’s again below the running average of 1,414.1, but again, the October spike throws that off. Without the October spike the running average was 964.3. 1,267 unique visitors is still my fourth-greatest number of unique visitors on record.

There were 61 likes given to any of my posts in March, essentially tied with the running average of 63.4 likes for a month. There were 21 comments, a nice boost from my running average of 13.9.

Per posting, my averages look pretty good. There were 136.6 views per posting in March, above the running average of 117.7. There were 84.5 visitors per posting, above the average 79.7. There were 4.1 likes per posting, above the average of 4.0 for the first time in ages. And there were even 1.4 comments per posting, well above the 0.9 comments per posting average, and my highest average there since January 2019.

So what all was particularly popular? The Playful Math Education Blog Carnival, alas, posted too late to take the top spot, although it’s looking good to place in April. The top five postings last month in order were:

• Reading the Comics, March 11, 2020: Half Week Edition
• How Many Grooves Are On A Record’s Side?
• Reading the Comics, March 14, 2016: Pi Day Comics Event
• How Two Trapezoids Make This Simpler
• The Playful Math Education Blog Carnival #136

I assume the popularity of that March 11 Reading the Comics post came from people looking for Pi Day strips. Why they ultimately found the 2016 Pi Day comics, rather than another year’s, I don’t know. I think the 2016 was a good year for strips, so maybe that’s what drew people in.

Counting my home page, 255 pages got any views at all in March. That’s up from the 210 of February and 218 of January. 145 of them got more than one page view, up from 108 in February and 102 in January. 35 posts got at least ten views, up from 25 in February and 27 in January.

Also, won’t fib here: my least-favorite part of this is trying to think of alt text that describes a map like this. Some month I’m just going to re-run the previous month’s and see if anybody says anything. … Wait, no readers in Japan? That seems unusual.

There were 78 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in March. Hey, one for each episode of the Original Star Trek, nice. That’s up from 67 in February and 63 in January. But this time there were 30 single-view countries, well above February’s 19 and January’s 18. Here’s the list of them:

Country	Readers
United States	1,244
Philippines	125
Thailand	80
United Kingdom	75
Canada	69
India	60
Germany	53
Singapore	35
Australia	27
Puerto Rico	26
Italy	17
Finland	16
France	14
Taiwan	12
Turkey	11
Brazil	10
Spain	10
Indonesia	9
Israel	8
China	7
Greece	7
Malaysia	7
South Africa	7
Denmark	6
Pakistan	6
Belgium	5
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Sweden	5
Switzerland	5
United Arab Emirates	5
European Union	4
Mexico	4
Netherlands	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Sri Lanka	4
Bulgaria	3
Croatia	3
Czech Republic	3
Nigeria	3
Norway	3
Qatar	3
Romania	3
Fiji	2
Hungary	2
Luxembourg	2
New Zealand	2
Oman	2
Serbia	2
American Samoa	1 (***)
Bahamas	1
Bangladesh	1
Bermuda	1
Cambodia	1 (**)
Colombia	1
Costa Rica	1
Cyprus	1
Egypt	1 (*)
Georgia	1
Guam	1
Ireland	1 (*)
Jamaica	1
Kenya	1
Latvia	1
Lebanon	1
Lithuania	1 (*)
Macau SAR China	1
Malta	1
Nepal	1
Nicaragua	1
Panama	1
Russia	1
Rwanda	1
Slovenia	1
South Korea	1 (**)
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Ukraine	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

Egypt, Ireland, and Lithuania were single-reader countries two months in a row. Cambodia and South Korea are single-reader countries three months in a row now. American Samoa is in its fourth month of a single reader for me.

In March I published 10,113 words by WordPress’s counter. This was 674.2 words per posting. So while that’s about five hundred more words than I wrote in February the average post shrank by nearly two hundred words. For the year to date I’m averaging now 721 words per post, down from 755.1 at the end of February.

As of the start of April I had collected 102,481 views from 56,182 logged unique visitors, over the course of 1,439 postings.

If you’d like to be among my regular readers, please do. You can use the “Follow Nebusresearch” button on the upper right corner of the page to add this to your WordPress reader. Or you can use the RSS feed https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed/ to read my stuff without showing up in any of my statistics. If you need an RSS reader, get a free account on Dreamwidth or Livejournal, which still exists. You can use their Friends pages as RSS readers. I’m still officially on Twitter as @Nebusj, and sort-of on the mathematics-themed Mastodon instance as @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, although I haven’t really got the hang of what to do there yet. We’ll see. Thank you for reading.