It’s a reasonable time for me to check on my readership statistics for the past month. The current month is maybe fourteen minutes from ending, after all. January was my most prolific month since October 2020, with 16 posts published. Nearly all were repostings of old A-to-Z essays. But if you weren’t checking in here in 2015, how would you know the difference, except by my pointing it out?
I have long suspected the thing that most affects my readership is how many times I post. So how did this block of repeat posts affect my readership? Says WordPress, it was like this:

The number of pages viewed in January rose to 2,108, its highest figure since October 2021. That’s below the running averages for the twelve months ending in December 2021, though. The running mean was 2,402.7 views per month, and the median 2,337 views per month. Ah, but what if we rate that per posting? Then there were 131.8 views per posting. The running mean was 321.8 views per posting and the running mean 307.4. (And none of this is to say that any posting got 132 views. Most of what’s read any month is older material. The things that have had the chance to get some traction as the answer to search engine queries.)
The number of unique visitors rose from December, to 1,458 unique visitors in January. That’s still below the running mean of 1,694.5 visitors and the running median of 1,654.5. Per posting, the figure is even more dire: 91.1 visitors per posting, compared to a mean of 226.6 and median of 219.2. These per-posting unique visitor numbers are in line with the sort of thing I did back in 2019 or so, when I had lots of postings in both the A-to-Z and in the Reading the Comics line, though.
There were 51 things liked here in January, a slight rise and even above the mean of 40.1 and median of 38.5. Per posting, that’s 3.2 likes, compared to a mean of 5.3 and median of 5.6. All of these below the likability count of distant years like 2018, which were themselves much less liked than, say, 2015.
Comments fell again, with only four given or received around here in January. The mean is 15.7 and median 11.5. That’s a dire 0.3 comments per posting, although I grant there wasn’t a lot for people to respond to. The mean is 2.0 comments per posting, and median 1.6, and, you know, I’ve had worse months. (February is looking like one!)
I had a lot of posts get at least some views in January. The five most popular posts from the month were:
- 78 Pages and More of Arithmetic Trivia About 2022
- How December 2021, The Month I Crashed, Treated My Mathematics Blog
- Some Progress on the Infinitude of Monkeys
- A Moment Which Turns Out to Be Universal
- How All Of 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog
And for one I have enough posts it feels silly to list all of them in order of decreasing popularity. I’m a touch surprised none of the A-to-Z reposts were among the most popular. What the record suggests is people like amusing little trifles or me talking about myself. Ah, if only it weren’t painful to talk about myself.
WordPress credits me with 18,040 words published in January, for an average of 1,128 words per posting. That’s more than any month of 2020 or 2021, to my surprise.
WordPress figures that as of the start of February I’d posted 1,691 things where, drawing 152,987 views from 91,642 logged unique visitors. And that there were a total of 3,311 comments altogether.
And that should be enough looking back for now. I hope to resume, and complete, the Little 2021 A-to-Z next week, and after that, let’s just see what I do.
If you would like to see, the easiest way to is to keep reading around here. There’s a button at the upper right of the page, “Follow Nebusresearch”, which should add this page to your WordPress reader. Or you can get posts e-mailed to you, using the ‘Follow Nebusresearch Via E-mail” button beneath that. I do nothing with that e-mail address except send posts. I don’t know what WordPress does with it. Or you can put the RSS feed into your reader, and read what you like without my ability to ever know it, except by your correcting me. However you choose to do it, thank you.