These reviews of my readership are always popular, somehow. And they don’t take serious work to write. Why, then, does it take me later and later in the month to actually post them? To the point that by next year I’m going to to slip a whole month behind? That’s a good question and it gets right to the heart of the matter, which is, I don’t know.
March was a busy month here. I can account for some of it. With Easter approaching people wanted help telling which was the pink Paas tablet. And one comic strip got cancelled and another got pulled from dozens of newspapers. That always brings some interest. That doesn’t seem like enough, though. There were 6,078 page views here in March, which is the third-highest readership I have on record. In comparison, in the twelve months leading up to March, the mean number of views was 4,984.3. The median was a relatively paltry 4,628.5.
The number of unique viewers also came in high. WordPress tells me there were 3,593 of them in March. The twelve-month running mean was only 2,947.0, and the median 2,701.5. It was even a chatty month. There were 128 likes given, compared to a mean of 103.9 and median of 102.5 for the twelve months prior. And an enormous 76 comments given, compared to a mean of 38.2 and median of 38.5. That’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had since November 2018, and as ever, I have no idea how that happened.
The most popular March-posted things this past month were what you’d expect: a lot of comic strip talk. Here’s the top five.
- The comic strip Buckles is ending in like eight minutes which was by far the most popular post here in March. Second-most-popular was a piece from last year, There’s nothing particular going on with the comic strip _Buckles_, which was true when I wrote it. I forgot about that post, though, which is a shame since if I had edited it sooner I might have left some people less confused.
- Why did Mallard Fillmore stop running in the newspaper?
- In Which I’m Upset About Comic Strips, Yes, Again
- MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XIX
- Statistics February: People Are Acclimated To The New Mark Trail
My most popular Statistics Saturday piece from March was Papal Regnal Numbers Over Time, 1900 – Present. I’m glad this is a popular chart because it graphs something that needs no graph and then makes a very silly interpolation.
I haven’t decided what to post for long-form pieces once Venus For Dummies is exhausted. I’m inclined toward another MiSTing, though. I do plan to continue the comic strip plot summaries. What I expect to do in the weeks ahead is:
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (13th of April)
- Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (20th of April)
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (27th of April)
- Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (4th of May)
Gasoline Alley by the way seems to have finally started its centennial of Skeezix. I don’t know why it started this months behind the actual day. Maybe it matched some important date besides Skeezix’s first appearance.
There were 89 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in March. Which ones? Here’s the always well-liked roster:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 4,693 |
| Canada | 205 |
| United Kingdom | 132 |
| Germany | 131 |
| India | 129 |
| Australia | 126 |
| Philippines | 50 |
| Italy | 46 |
| South Africa | 40 |
| Finland | 39 |
| Brazil | 36 |
| Malaysia | 33 |
| Spain | 29 |
| France | 26 |
| Mexico | 21 |
| Norway | 20 |
| Indonesia | 17 |
| Iceland | 13 |
| Ireland | 13 |
| Japan | 13 |
| New Zealand | 13 |
| Puerto Rico | 12 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 11 |
| Kenya | 11 |
| Denmark | 10 |
| Netherlands | 10 |
| Romania | 10 |
| Sweden | 10 |
| United Arab Emirates | 10 |
| Argentina | 8 |
| Hungary | 8 |
| Macedonia | 8 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Singapore | 7 |
| South Korea | 7 |
| Belgium | 5 |
| Colombia | 5 |
| Sri Lanka | 5 |
| Switzerland | 5 |
| Turkey | 5 |
| Ecuador | 4 |
| Egypt | 4 |
| Jamaica | 4 |
| Nigeria | 4 |
| Russia | 4 |
| Austria | 3 |
| Bangladesh | 3 |
| European Union | 3 |
| Greece | 3 |
| Mauritius | 3 |
| Morocco | 3 |
| Namibia | 3 |
| Poland | 3 |
| Saudi Arabia | 3 |
| Taiwan | 3 |
| Thailand | 3 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 3 |
| Ukraine | 3 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2 |
| Cambodia | 2 |
| Cameroon | 2 |
| Kuwait | 2 |
| Lebanon | 2 |
| Montenegro | 2 |
| Pakistan | 2 |
| Peru | 2 |
| Vietnam | 2 |
| Åland Islands | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Barbados | 1 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| Bulgaria | 1 (*) |
| China | 1 |
| Cyprus | 1 |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| Guadeloupe | 1 |
| Guam | 1 (*) |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| Guyana | 1 |
| Lithuania | 1 |
| Malta | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Slovakia | 1 |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| Somalia | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Uganda | 1 |
| Venezuela | 1 |
There were 22 single-view countries. Bulgaria and Guam were the only ones to be single-view countries in February also. No country is on a three-month or longer streak.
WordPress figures I posted 18,611 words in March, my fewest for any one month this year. It’s an average of 600.4 words per posting in March, which is what happens when I don’t write up so many Popeye cartoons. I’m at 59,055 words for the whole year, so far, an average of 656 words per posting in 2021.
Between the Broadway debut of The Male Animal (9th of January, 1940, at the Cort) and the start of April 2021 (1st of April, 2021) I’ve posted 2,981 things here, says WordPress. These have drawn 223,457 views from 126,975 unique visitors.
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