Statistics 2021: At Last, How The Old Year Liked Me Writing About _The Phantom_

I have not been avoiding a check back on the past year, to see what WordPress figures my readership was like. I simply have had that thing happen where I get up, have lunch, do three things, and then it’s 11 pm. You may have noticed this in your own lives, depending on when you have lunch.

WordPress figures there were 60,665 pages viewed here in all of 2021. That’s the largest number of page views I’ve gotten any year, to date. These views came from 36,061 unique visitors, as WordPress counts visitors. That, too, is the largest number of unique visitors I’ve gotten in a year. I owe it all to talking about comic strips.

Bar chart of annual readership from 2013 to the present. It's been one of steady growth except for 2016. 2021 showed 60,665 views from 36,061 visitors, at 1.68 views per visitor and a total 365 posts published. — Not to brag but do you have any idea how many extrapolations I, using my mathematical training, could make from a data set as small as this? And how bad all these conclusions would be? It’s thrilling stuff.

As measures of engagement go? 2021 saw some rises here. There were 1,772 things liked during the year, well above 2020 and my highest count since 2018. And there were 700 comments, not just a nice round number but more than 2019 and 2020 gave me combined. (2018, again, was higher still, but 2018 was a better year for most people than 2021 was.) I owe it all to talking about comic strips.

I mean that last with typical literalness. The five most popular things I posted in 2021 were:

I would be nowhere if people weren’t curious about The Phantom.

My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was 60s Popeye: Myskery Melody, a cartoon people have been asking for. This is also gratifying. The 60s cartoons are not regarded as important even to fans of Popeye. I’m glad to know that there are people who’ll pay attention if you give serious consideration to the pop-culture footnotes.

My most popular piece not tied to a review or recap was A question created when I was looking up _The Odd Couple_, a serendipitous event. I’ve been reading an early-90s encyclopedia of cartoon animals and yesterday came across its entry about The Oddball Couple, the cartoon I can’t believe existed. Even this independent evidence of its existence doesn’t convince me.

I went all 2021 without doing any original long-form essays. In its place was Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. The most popular piece of that was MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XIX. I don’t know how that of all the chapters got the top

I don’t know how long I’ll go on posting MiSTings. They offer the considerable advantage that I know how to write them when I don’t feel much like writing. But all the Mystery Science Theater 3000 stuff I gather at this link. And the thing everyone really wants from me, the story strip recaps, are all gathered at this link. There are also individual links for all the story strips, by title. The Phantom is here, and the other ten story strips I’m still covering have their own tags. Yes, I’m also bothered by how Wilbur Weston returned home in Mary Worth today.

Mercator-style map of the world, with the United States in dark red and most of the New World, western Europe, South and Pacific Rim Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a more uniform pink. Africa along the Mediterranean coast, and the southern tip, are in pink also, as is the horn. Most of central Africa is unrepresented, though. — It’s always obvious how I never get readers from Greenland. But did you know I never get readers from Togo, Benin, Chad, or the Central African Republic? Equatorial Guinea has no interest in my writing either.

There were 157 countries or things as good as countries to send me some page views in all 2021. Here’s the roster as WordPress makes them out:

Country	Readers
United States	42,643
India	2,412
Canada	2,309
United Kingdom	1,755
Australia	1,413
Germany	1,022
Philippines	853
Brazil	762
Sweden	438
Italy	437
Spain	414
Finland	351
France	346
South Africa	328
Ireland	242
Norway	224
Mexico	213
Japan	210
Malaysia	182
Indonesia	176
Greece	168
Netherlands	159
Romania	144
Ecuador	138
Singapore	128
Denmark	127
Austria	124
New Zealand	121
Portugal	117
Thailand	105
Nigeria	96
European Union	92
Argentina	91
Peru	90
Russia	87
Switzerland	87
Turkey	87
United Arab Emirates	80
South Korea	77
Poland	73
Sri Lanka	70
Saudi Arabia	65
Israel	63
Belgium	62
Kuwait	61
Chile	59
El Salvador	58
Colombia	55
Hong Kong SAR China	55
Egypt	53
Serbia	53
Taiwan	53
Jamaica	46
Oman	46
Puerto Rico	46
Hungary	41
Pakistan	41
Czech Republic	40
Trinidad & Tobago	37
Kenya	35
Latvia	34
Lebanon	31
Vietnam	28
Croatia	27
Ukraine	24
Jordan	23
Bangladesh	21
Bulgaria	21
Iceland	20
Macedonia	19
Qatar	19
China	18
Venezuela	17
Iraq	16
Costa Rica	15
Georgia	15
Paraguay	14
Bahrain	13
Lithuania	13
Montenegro	13
Guadeloupe	12
Malta	12
Barbados	11
Slovakia	10
Bosnia & Herzegovina	9
Mauritius	9
Albania	8
Algeria	8
Bahamas	8
Belarus	8
Morocco	8
Cayman Islands	7
Estonia	7
Fiji	7
French Guiana	7
Macau SAR China	7
Nepal	7
Papua New Guinea	7
Cambodia	6
Guatemala	6
Panama	6
Zimbabwe	6
Belize	5
Dominican Republic	5
Libya	5
Mongolia	5
Slovenia	5
Uruguay	5
American Samoa	4
Bolivia	4
Brunei	4
Cape Verde	4
Guam	4
Guernsey	4
Maldives	4
St. Lucia	4
Tunisia	4
Cyprus	3
Honduras	3
Namibia	3
St. Vincent & Grenadines	3
Sudan	3
Tanzania	3
Bermuda	2
Burundi	2
Cameroon	2
Guyana	2
Isle of Man	2
Madagascar	2
Moldova	2
Senegal	2
Uzbekistan	2
Åland Islands	1
Armenia	1
Azerbaijan	1
Bhutan	1
Botswana	1
Cook Islands	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Cuba	1
Dominica	1
Ethiopia	1
Ghana	1
Jersey	1
Kyrgyzstan	1
Liberia	1
Liechtenstein	1
Luxembourg	1
Malawi	1
Mauritania	1
Nicaragua	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Sint Maarten	1
Somalia	1
St. Martin	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Uganda	1

I had no page views from the Vatican in 2021. I’m less surprised by that than I am by having had one page view from the Vatican on my mathematics blog. They have to have better things to worry about than what the current story in Gil Thorp is.

WordPress figures I posted a total of 269,360 words in 2021, for an average of 738 words per posting. That’s my most verbose year on record, which reflects how much bulk goes into the various MiSTings. Each post got, on average, 4.5 likes and 2.2 comments.

If you’d like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, it’s easy enough to do. There’s a button labelled “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” in the upper right corner of the page. You can also subscribe for e-mail delivery of articles at they post. I do nothing with the e-mail address besides have the WordPress Corporation send them out. I can’t say what else the WordPress Corporation does with them. If you have an RSS reader, you can use the feed https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed and read without showing up in my statistics.

Whatever way you read, though, I appreciate your doing. Thank you and I hope all’s going okay for you.