I still like doing these start-of-the-month looks at my statistics. Somehow taking a big pile of numbers and sharing them with people who aren’t responsible for them appeals to me. At least it’s one essay each month that’s easy to think of what to write. Actually writing it is another thing.
And please remember you can follow this blog regularly by using the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ link in the upper right corner of this page. If you want to read without being tracked, counted, numbered, or spindled, please use the RSS feed. RSS is a great solution and the web should use it more. If you do feel like being indexed, briefed, and debriefed, you can follow me on Twitter as @Nebusj. Every new post gets a mention there. Also the “publicity widget” that posts notices on Twitter is also supposed to put notices on Google+. It is very concerned that I understand why that’s going away. I have not checked, but I believe I have in total gotten zero views from Google+, so, you know, it can relax a bit there.
So what happened with the number and variety of readers I attracted in February 2019?
OK, so, that’s a bit of a drop. 2,428 views in February, compared to 3,343 in January and 2,866 in December 2018. I’d like to attribute this all to February’s shortness. But the average-per-day views plummeted in February: 87, says a WordPress panel I’m not going to bother including a screenshot of. In January there were 108 views per day on average. December had 92 views per day, which isn’t too far off February’s. But still: I haven’t had that few views-per-day since December 2017. Not sure what happened there. My best guess is that Roy Kassinger was very busy with things.
The number of unique visitors dropped too, although not quite so precipitously. There were 1,429 unique visitors recorded in February, versus 1,830 in January and 1,632 in December. That’s about the same number of unique visitors per day in February as in December, anyway. The number of likes fell to 156 from January’s 183. But that’s up from December’s 137 and is at least within striking distance of the 165-to-180-likes average most of 2018 showed. The number of comments dropped to 34 from January’s 70, and December’s 44, but comments are such a scattershot thing around here anyway. This is more talky than I was managing in 2017, anyway.
What was popular here in February? What’s always popular here, every month? The top five:
- What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird? Well, everybody’s heard about Olivia Jaimes by now, right?
- I Don’t Know Who’s Officially Writing Spider-Man Now It’s Roy Thomas, but he’s still credited as “Stan Lee”.
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018 which has got to be mostly people who are looking for my planned-for-Sunday recap of the most recent three months of this story. It’ll be up here soon, unless some other story strip has major news requiring attention.
- What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Does the ham radio guy know what kind of plane this is? November 2018 – February 2019 which is finally a moment of people looking for story updates and getting the right essay for them! Yay!
- Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending? Yes and yes, if by “ending” you mean “ended”.
My most popular non-comic-strip related thing was Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order and … uh … huh. All right. I haven’t thought about this one since it posted four years ago and I needed a moment to get the joke. I hope it has inspired people to have extremely Internet fights about the question.
My most popular long-form essay was one from this month. That’s always flattering. It was Some Things To Understand About The 1980s. Nicely enough that’s also the essay I’m happiest with from this past month. It’s got a strange tone for me, but a tone I like. I shall have to think about how I got into the mood to write this piece. I still think there should be something more to do with the concept of Muppet Babies Kids.
Still, the story strips remain my most popular thing, and the thing that draws readers in. Here’s my plan for story strips to recap through to April. This may change if a strip has some big event, like new writers or artists or a reboot or something that makes people wonder if the comic is still being made.
- Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (week of the 10th of March)
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (week of the 17th of March)
- Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (week of the 24th of March)
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (week of the 31st of March)
- James Allen’s Mark Trail (week of the 7th of April)
And all my story strip plot recaps should appear at this link. If you see one that doesn’t, please let me know. It likely means I just tagged something wrong.
65 countries sent me readers in February. There had been 68 such in January, but 61 in December. This all seems pretty stable then.
Ooh, 1766 readers from the United States. This seems neat to me because 1766 is the year that my undergraduate school was founded. So, you know, my making that association right away shows why everybody treated me like that in middle school.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 1766 |
| India | 98 |
| Canada | 95 |
| United Kingdom | 77 |
| Australia | 66 |
| Italy | 23 |
| Peru | 20 |
| Mexico | 19 |
| Germany | 17 |
| South Africa | 15 |
| Sweden | 14 |
| Brazil | 13 |
| Philippines | 13 |
| Netherlands | 12 |
| Singapore | 12 |
| Spain | 12 |
| Finland | 11 |
| American Samoa | 9 |
| France | 9 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Japan | 7 |
| New Zealand | 7 |
| European Union | 6 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 6 |
| South Korea | 6 |
| Chile | 5 |
| Indonesia | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Georgia | 4 |
| Ireland | 4 |
| Romania | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Malaysia | 3 |
| Nepal | 3 |
| Norway | 3 |
| Russia | 3 |
| Taiwan | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Belgium | 2 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2 |
| Greece | 2 |
| Jamaica | 2 |
| Malta | 2 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Portugal | 2 |
| Puerto Rico | 2 |
| Saudi Arabia | 2 |
| Slovakia | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Cameroon | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Kazakhstan | 1 |
| Kenya | 1 |
| Mongolia | 1 |
| Montenegro | 1 |
| Pakistan | 1 |
| Serbia | 1 (*) |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| St. Martin | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Venezuela | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
There were 15 single-reader countries in February. There had been 19 in January, but the only country in common both months was Serbia. And wow, I was this close to a complete new slate of single-reader countries. That’s exciting to be. But see above comment about why everybody treated me like that in middle school. There had been 12 single-reader countries in December.
I averaged 599 words per post, in the 59 posts made from the start of the year through the end of February. That rose from my end-of-January arithmetic mean of 590. I published 17,036 words in February, bringing my total for the year to 35,326 words. I don’t know if that counts things like captions to images or the alt-text for images. For the year to date I’m averaging 1.6 comments per post, down from 1.7 at the end of January. I’m averaging 5.5 likes per post, down from 5.7 at the end of January. Hm.
What’s not decreasing is the total number of posts I’ve made: 2,219 at the end of February. Oh, so I failed to mention then that yesterday’s Alley Oop recap was post number 2,222. Neat. As of the start of February I’ve had 114,303 total views, from 63,017 unique visitors. My most-read day ever remains the 24th of November, 2015. That when some of my writing about the collapse of Apartment 3-G got mentioned on The Onion AV Club and old Usenet pal Joe Blevins gave my blog its name. That’s probably not going to ever change. I wonder if there’s a way to get data on my third-most-read days.
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