So back in January I didn’t get my review of the previous month’s statistics done until the 11th. I wrote how I hoped to get it done sooner in the next month. Now it’s the 14th, or the 15th by the time you read this, in certain time zones. You see how well I’m doing keeping on top of everything, everywhere. It’s been busy. But let’s get to seeing how well-read I was in January of 2020, before we get into March of 2020.
There were 3,108 page views around here in January. That’s slightly up from December. It’s still down an appreciable bit from the twelve-month running average, though, of 3,562.2 views per month. I don’t know whether this reflects December and January being abnormally low readership or the several months before that being abnormally high. There were 1,750 unique visitors recorded in January, just about the same as December (1,760). But that’s also below the twelve-month running average, which was was 2,044.9.

127 things were liked during January, the highest monthly figure since August. That’s still below the twelve-month average of 142.9, though. And the monthly figures for that seem to be on a long-term decline anyway. There were 14 comments in January, well below the twelve-month average of 23.1. But the comic strip summaries were about the less controversial comics, so maybe that’s nothing big.
By the way, the plan for the next several weeks of comic strips are to report What’s Going On In …
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (16th of February)
- Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (23rd of February)
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (1st of March)
- James Allen’s Mark Trail (8th of March)
As ever, this is subject to change in the event of news. All the story strip comics essays whatever the comic should be gathered at this link.
Those essays are reliably my most popular. But there’s still surprises. For example, here’s the five posts read the most in January, none of which were posted in 2020:
- Here’s What I Thought About All The Talkartoons I Watched
- Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order
- What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018
- What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why Is Everyone Rightly Mad At Mary Worth? August – October 2018
- How Did The Amazing-Spider-Man End? Is It Ever Coming Back?
I do not feel bad for clickbaiting people looking for “mark trail fetish” because they got what they should have expected. I’m surprised who’s that interested in reading about the Fleischer Studios Talkartoons all of a sudden, though.
Past that, the most-read thing I posted in January was a single-sentence post, which implies terrible things about how amusing my essays are. Speaking of essays, two tied for the title of most-popular long-form comic essay for the month. My Question To You, And My Windshield Wiper was one of them. It’s the true story of how somehow I can have buying a windshield wiper turn into a fiasco. The other most-popular-essay was Some Reasons Everybody Treated Me Like That In Middle School, recounting things that my dumb young-adolescent brain insisted on thinking about back then. I am sincerely glad that people enjoy looking at the things that go on in my brain in place of thought processes.
Overall, 450 posts got any page views at all, up from 420 in December. 173 of them got only a single page view, up from December’s 159 but just a little.

68 things that WordPress calls countries sent me any page views in January. That’s right about the same as December’s 65 and near enough November’s 74. 20 of these countries sent a single view, up a noticeable bit from January’s 13. The full roster was:
Country | Readers |
---|---|
United States | 2,166 |
Italy | 170 |
India | 109 |
Canada | 89 |
United Kingdom | 80 |
Germany | 53 |
Australia | 48 |
Brazil | 38 |
European Union | 35 |
Philippines | 27 |
Denmark | 21 |
Mexico | 18 |
Spain | 17 |
El Salvador | 13 |
France | 13 |
Portugal | 12 |
Sweden | 12 |
Bulgaria | 11 |
Colombia | 10 |
Finland | 10 |
Russia | 10 |
Belgium | 9 |
Netherlands | 9 |
Thailand | 9 |
Nigeria | 8 |
Switzerland | 8 |
South Korea | 7 |
United Arab Emirates | 7 |
South Africa | 6 |
Taiwan | 6 |
Uruguay | 6 |
Ireland | 5 |
Norway | 5 |
Austria | 4 |
Hungary | 4 |
Malaysia | 4 |
Argentina | 3 |
Poland | 3 |
Romania | 3 |
Singapore | 3 |
Slovakia | 3 |
Egypt | 2 |
Indonesia | 2 |
Japan | 2 |
Kenya | 2 |
Kuwait | 2 |
Peru | 2 |
Vietnam | 2 |
American Samoa | 1 |
Bangladesh | 1 |
Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
Chile | 1 (*) |
China | 1 |
Costa Rica | 1 |
Dominican Republic | 1 |
Ethiopia | 1 |
Hong Kong SAR China | 1 |
Jamaica | 1 (*) |
Latvia | 1 |
Mongolia | 1 |
Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
New Zealand | 1 |
Pakistan | 1 |
Senegal | 1 |
Serbia | 1 |
Slovenia | 1 |
Sri Lanka | 1 |
Trinidad & Tobago | 1 |
Chile and Jamaica were single-view countries in December also. No countries are on three-month streaks. I have no idea what happened that Italy sent me 170 page views; in December it had sent eight. I must have accidentally optimized a search engine or something.
In January I posted 16,985 words here, as WordPress counts words, which is always slightly mysterious. This averages to 548 words per post. That’s almost exactly on December’s average, as there were 16,820 words in that month. Overall, by the start of February, I had posted 2,556 things, which collected 154,386 views from 86,047 unique visitors. I suppose now that figure’s higher than 86,400. So someone out there was the same viewer number as the typical number of seconds in a day. I bet they didn’t even have an inkling. If I had this thought earlier, it would have been an explanation for why people treated me like that in middle school.
If you’d like to be a regular reader here, please, do be one. You can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page to add it to your WordPress reader. If you have an RSS reader, you can put https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ in. A free account on Livejournal, which exists, or Dreamwidth, which also does, will let you add RSS feeds on your Friends page. My moribund Twitter account @Nebusj still has the automated postings of new pieces, too. Whatever way you do choose to read, though, thank you for doing it, and here’s hoping you choose to do it again.