Statistics May: How the past month treated my humor blog

So how do my readership figures for May look? And how do they look compared to past months? And the short answer is that it’s down from April, because nobody cares about Easter egg dye colors anymore. But it’s still a comfortably large number. Not quite the figures I saw at the end of Apartment 3-G, but surprisingly close.

Specifically, there were 4,292 page views here in May 2020, spread across 2,505 unique visitors. That’s above the twelve-month running averages for these figures. The average was 3,769.6 page views from 2,179.8 unique visitors. The twelve-month running averages are increasing month-to-month too, but I’m not going to start tracking that because that’s getting daft.

Bar chart of two years, four months, in total views and unique visitors. The trend is generally upward, though falling back after a spike above 5,000 visitors in April. — By the way the default chart shows two years and five months’ worth of figures. I write this because every month I swear I’m going to remember just how much it shows, and then I forget, and I look at all the month tabs and I get lost and I guess it’s about two and a half years. Which it is, although why 29 months instead of 30 is another of those mysteries.

The disappointing figure in all this was the number of likes, which have been trending down forever now. There were 67 things liked in all of May, way below the running average of 109.5. More important than that, though, was that 39 comments came in over the month, well above the 19.8 average. That’s also three months in a row with more than thirty comments, which makes me feel so much better, really.

The per-post averages are all rather similar. There were on average 138.5 views per posting in May; the twelve-month average is 123.7. There were 80.8 unique visitors per posting in May; the average is 71.6. There were 2.2 likes per posting in May; the average was 3.6. There were 1.3 comments per posting; the average was 0.6.

There were 556 distinct postings that got at least one page view in May, up from April’s 514. 359 of them got more than one page view, up from 323. Only 72 pages got more than ten views, slightly down from April’s 76.

The most popular comic strips were a recurring mystery, and then a bunch of comic strip stuff:

I continue to have no idea why that months-in-reverse-alphabetical-order is popular, or why it’s staying popular. I feel like it must have got put on a list incorrectly. Or there’s just that many bots who got something wrong.

All those posts are old ones, though. The most popular thing posted in May was a comic strip recap, What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is the Phantom punching terrorists? February – May 2020. My most popular May piece that was intended to be funny was Remembering the home computers of the 1980s, one of my long-form essays that’s still a mushy nostalgic haze.

There were 77 countries, or things like countries, that sent me any readers in May. There’d been 78 in April and 73 in March, so that’s all normal enough. There were 20 single-view countries, just like in March, and basically like in April, when there were 19. Here’s the roster of what countries they were, and how many views each got:

Mercator-style map of the world with the United States in deepest red. Most of the Americas, western Europe, South Asia and the Asian Pacific nations are in a uniform, less intense pink. Almost no African countries are pink. — I do kind of wish WordPress would use a different map projection, because every single month I give this the alt-text ‘Mercator-style map of the world’ and every single month I have to look up whether it’s ‘Mercator’ or ‘Mercatur’. And I’m the map freak here. Me! Anyway if they could do an equirectangular or maybe a Gall or Lambert I’d save myself that little bit of monthly embarrassment.

Country	Readers
United States	3,171
India	177
United Kingdom	135
Canada	128
Australia	65
Germany	59
Sweden	58
Brazil	46
Italy	35
South Korea	33
Philippines	28
Finland	24
France	20
Spain	19
Colombia	14
El Salvador	13
Ireland	13
Russia	13
Mexico	12
Portugal	12
Norway	11
Argentina	9
Indonesia	9
Malaysia	9
Vietnam	9
Kenya	8
Netherlands	8
New Zealand	8
South Africa	8
Serbia	7
Singapore	7
Taiwan	7
China	6
Denmark	6
Jamaica	6
Japan	6
Poland	6
Turkey	6
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Pakistan	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Belgium	4
Chile	4
Czech Republic	4
Peru	4
Croatia	3
European Union	3
Iceland	3
Israel	3
Romania	3
Venezuela	3
Barbados	2
Bolivia	2
Costa Rica	2
Ecuador	2
Morocco	2
Zambia	2
Bahamas	1
Bangladesh	1 (**)
Belarus	1
Bhutan	1
Egypt	1 (**)
Greece	1
Guam	1
Guatemala	1 (*)
Lebanon	1 (***)
Mauritius	1
Panama	1
Puerto Rico	1
Saudi Arabia	1 (*)
Slovakia	1
St. Lucia	1
Switzerland	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Tunisia	1
Uruguay	1 (*)
Zimbabwe	1

Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and Uruguay were single-view countries last month too. Bangladesh and Egypt have been single-view countries three months in a row. Lebanon is on its fourth month so.

Through the start of June, I had published a total 2,677 posts. They’ve drawn 171,428 views from a recorded 96,260 visitors. And I’m hoping some of them will stick around for my writing. Each Thursday, Eastern Time, I post a long-form humor essay. Each Saturday, similarly, I post something for Statistics Saturday, my Dad’s favorite feature here. And then, for Tuesdays lately, I watch What’s Going On In the story comics. My plan for the coming month, subject to breaking news, is to cover these strips:

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (9th of June)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (16th of June)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (23rd of June)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (30th of June)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (7th of July)

WordPress estimates that I published 15,458 words here in May, in 31 posts averaging just over 515 and a quarter words each. For the year to date I’ve published 83,346 words, over 150 posts, for an average 556 words per posting. This is running a bit under the pace for 2019, which I am fine with.

I’m always glad to have more regular readers. If you’re on WordPress you can become a regular reader by clicking the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or you can add the RSS feed for articles to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have an RSS reader, good news: you can get a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal, and use their Friends page to look at any RSS feed you like. I also announce posts by automated service to my Twitter account of @Nebusj. But while I’d sort of like to be active there again, Twitter only sometimes lets Safari read it. I don’t know what its issue is, and I don’t have the energy to work it out. Sorry.