I didn’t quite abandon my mathematics blog in July, but it would be hard to prove otherwise. I published only five pieces, which I think is my lowest monthly production on record. One of them was the monthly statistics recap. One pointed to a neat thing I found. Three were pointers to earlier essays I’ve written here. It’s economical stuff, But it draws in fewer readers, a thing I’m conditioned to think of as bad. How bad?
I received 1,891 page views in July, way below the running mean of 2,545.0 for the twelve months ending with June 2021. This is also well below the running median of 2,559. There were 1,324 unique visitors in July, way below the running mean of 1,797.1 and median of 1,801. The number of likes barely dropped from June’s totals, with 34 things given a like here. That’s well down from the mean of 56.8 per month and the 55.5 per month median. And comments were dire, only four received compared to a mean of 20.5 and median of 19.
That’s the kind of collapse which makes it look like the blog’s just dried up and floated away. But these readership figures are still a good bit above most of 2020, for example, or all but one month of 2018. I’m feeling the effects of the hedonic treadmill here.
And, now — if we consider that per posting? Suddenly my laconic nature starts to seem like genius. There were an average 378.2 views per posting in July. Not all July posts, but the number of views divided by the number posts given. That’s crushing the twelve-month mean of 232.9 views per posting, and twelve-month median of 235.0 views per posting. There were 264.8 unique visitors per posting. The twelve-month running mean was 165.2 unique visitors per posting, and the median 166.3.
Even the likes and comments look better this way. There were 6.8 likes for each time I posted, above the mean of 4.7 and median of 4.3. There were still only 0.8 comments per posting, below the mean of 1.9 and median of 1.6, but at least the numbers look closer together.
The order of popularity of July’s essays, most to least, was:
- Is this mathematics thing ambiguous or confusing?
- How to Make a Transcendental Number
- How June 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog
- How To Find A Logarithm Without Much Computing Power
- How to Tell if a Point Is Inside a Shape
The most popular essay of all was No, You Can’t Say What 6/2(1+2) Equals. From this I infer some segment of Twitter got worked up about an ambiguous arithmetic expression again.
WordPress estimates that I published 3,103 words in July. This is an average of merely 517.2 words per posting, a figure that will increase as soon as I get this year’s A-to-Z under way. My average words per posting for 2021 declined to 611 thanks to all this. I am at 33,575 words for the year so far.
As of the start of August I’ve had 140,178 page views from an 82,728 logged unique visitors. If you’d like to be a regular reader, I’d like to be regularly read. Heck, I’d like to be read any old way people manage. You can get all my essays by adding the RSS feed to your reader. If you lack an RSS reader? There’s several good options. You can use This Old Reader, for example, set up on NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.
If you’d like to get new posts without typos corrected, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. Use the “Follow NebusResearch via Email” box to the right-center of the page here.. Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow NebusResearch” on the top right to add this page to your Reader. And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. Thanks for reading, however you find most comfortable.
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