How June 2020 Taught Me How Many People Just Read Me For The Comics

As part of stepping back how much I’ve committed to writing, I had figured to not do my full write-ups of monthly readership statistics. Too many of the statistics were too common, month to month; I don’t need to keep trying to tease information out about which South American countries got a single page view any given month. But I’m not quite courageous enough to abandon them altogether, either.

In June I published 13 pieces, which is a pretty common number. A-to-Z months usually have more than that — last year I managed a several-month streak where I published every single day — but I’m deliberately trying not to do that this time. The number of page views dropped, though. There were 1,318 page views in June, from a recorded 929 unique visitors. That’s way below the twelve-month running averages of 2,289.3 views from 1,551.2 visitors. It’s my lowest page view count since June of 2019, when everybody had that mysterious drop in readers. It’s my lowest visitor count since December 2019.

Mostly I’m not including the map of countries that sent me any readers because I hate having to look up whether it’s Mercatur or Mercator in describing the map projection. You’d think the spell checker would help me, but I have managed to misspell Cincinnati(?) enough times that it won’t tell me when I’m doing that wrong, so I can’t trust it on other words now. Also I’m not positive that WordPress is using Mercator rather than some other casually-similar-looking projection and somehow that’s a distinction I treat as important for my alt text?

There were 22 comments given in June, above the average of 15.4, thanks in part to how A-to-Z sequences appeal directly for comments. There were 43 likes, which is down from the running average of 60.1.

In all, a stunning rebuke to cutting back on my comic strip content. Maybe, anyway. Viewed per posting, it’s a less dramatic collapse. Per posting, there were 101.4 views, compared to an average of 129.2. That’s about four-fifths my average, rather than the three-fifths that the raw numbers implied. There were 71.5 unique visitors per posting, compared to an average of 86.8. Again, that’s a one-fifth drop rather than the two-fifths that the raw figures said I had. 3.3 likes per posting, compared to an average of 3.6. That’s barely a drop. And 1.7 comments per posting, compared to an average 1.0.

The most popular pieces … you know, I don’t need to support the popularity of my grooves-on-a-record-album or the count of different trapezoids. Let me list the five most popular pieces published in June, from June. You can almost see the transition from comics to A-to-Z:

• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Michael Atiyah
• Reading the Comics, June 3, 2020: Subjective Opinions Edition
• Reading the Comics, June 7, 2020: Hiatus Edition which I notice also drew one downvote, in the up-and-down rating that nobody uses, at the top of my posts.
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Butterfly Effect
• Using my A to Z Archives: Ansatz

I started July having posted 1,480 things here, gathering 107,748 views from a recorded 59,837 unique visitors. So somewhere along the lines I’ve missed visitor #60,000. Sorry, whoever you were.

I’d published 9,771 words in June, at an average 751.6 words per posting. My average post length so far this year has been 672 words. I’m curious how this will change with me writing one big piece a week, and then a bunch of shorter ones around it.

And I’m always happy to have more readers, even as I’m afraid of answering their comments. You can “Follow Nebusresearch” using the button on this page. Or you can add my RSS feed to whatever reader you like. I do announce posts on my sometimes-accessible @Nebusj Twitter account, and I’m trying to post announcements of new A-to-Z essays to my account on the mathematics-themed Mastodon account, @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz. Thanks for reading, however many of you remain.