There is no getting around it: people really, really want to follow Wilbur Weston dying. Since my last Mary Worth plot recap, he has not died. He didn’t even get a round of people to start slapping him and never stop, the way he deserved. And with that, my readership has dropped again. So let’s take a look at the specifics.
January 2022 was my most popular month in almost a year. February 2022 was almost suspicious in its averageness. WordPress recorded 5,411 page views here. For the twelve months from February 2021 through January 2022, the mean was 5,206.3 page views and the median 4,585. There were 3,012 unique visitors, down from January again. But the twelve-month running mean was 3,067.9 unique visitors. The median was 2,616.5 visitors. So really this suggests a month with more readers than average, and looking at the graph suggests that.
The number of likes continued its ongoing decline, to a mere 151 over the month. But the twelve-month running average was 149.7 likes, and the median 149, so, what more could I want? Comments I don’t answer? I got 52 of them (counting my answers), below the running mean of 59.1 and running median of 56.5.
What were the popular things from February? Comic strip talk, obviously. What people wanted to see was Wilbur Weston die, fairly enough. Or to hear whether it’s just them or has Comics Kingdom screwed up its web site. It’s not you. Just go ahead and assume, for all time, that Comics Kingdom has messed something up. So here’s the five most popular things from February and see if you can work out what the readers want to see:
- Statistics January: Nearly 7,000 People Wanted To See Wilbur Weston Die
- Comics Kingdom is still trying to fix things and also get people to read _Animal Crackers_
- Yeah, Comics Kingdom really borked their web site
- What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Is Terry Beatty trying to upstage you? November 2021 – January 2022
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April angry the show she wanted made got made? November 2021 – February 2022
My most popular piece that was not based on comic strips? That would be In Which I Am Looking for a Peer Reviewer and reveal that I’m spending my days watching Buzzr instead of doing anything else. I’m sorry, but Celebrity Whew! is a crackling good watch. Also, I believe I have worked out a scenario in which a contestant on Card Sharks could run out of cards, but I want to confirm my reasoning before publishing my results.
My schedule for the story comic plot recaps, for the coming month, is this:
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (8 March)
- Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (15 March)
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (22 March)
- Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (29 March)
- Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (5 April)
All of that is subject to breaking news, of course. But all the story strip plot recaps are at this link, if you want to be sure you miss none of them.
There were fully 90 countries sending me readers in February, up from January’s figure. 24 of them were single-view countries, a substantial jump percentage-wise from January’s 17. Here’s the roster of those figures:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 4,219 |
| India | 195 |
| Canada | 144 |
| United Kingdom | 123 |
| Australia | 78 |
| Germany | 62 |
| Philippines | 56 |
| Brazil | 49 |
| Sweden | 41 |
| Italy | 28 |
| Spain | 26 |
| Finland | 25 |
| Mexico | 24 |
| Japan | 21 |
| Ireland | 18 |
| Turkey | 18 |
| Colombia | 15 |
| France | 15 |
| Russia | 15 |
| Egypt | 13 |
| Nigeria | 13 |
| Belgium | 10 |
| Poland | 10 |
| Saudi Arabia | 9 |
| Argentina | 8 |
| Norway | 7 |
| Vietnam | 7 |
| Costa Rica | 6 |
| Singapore | 6 |
| Switzerland | 6 |
| Uruguay | 6 |
| Bulgaria | 5 |
| Ecuador | 5 |
| Greece | 5 |
| Malaysia | 5 |
| New Zealand | 5 |
| Thailand | 5 |
| Barbados | 4 |
| Cyprus | 4 |
| Czech Republic | 4 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 4 |
| Indonesia | 4 |
| Netherlands | 4 |
| Pakistan | 4 |
| Peru | 4 |
| Puerto Rico | 4 |
| South Africa | 4 |
| Guatemala | 3 |
| Portugal | 3 |
| Romania | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 |
| U.S. Virgin Islands | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Austria | 2 |
| Azerbaijan | 2 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Israel | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Kuwait | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Macedonia | 2 |
| Malta | 2 |
| Mongolia | 2 |
| South Korea | 2 |
| Taiwan | 2 |
| Venezuela | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| American Samoa | 1 |
| Anguilla | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Belize | 1 |
| Bolivia | 1 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
| Brunei | 1 |
| Cambodia | 1 |
| Cameroon | 1 |
| Cuba | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 (*) |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| European Union | 1 |
| Ghana | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Lebanon | 1 |
| Libya | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| Ukraine | 1 |
Estonia was the only country to send me a single page view in January also. There’s no countries on a three-month streak of reading me as slightly as possible.
WordPress figures that I published 16,171 words in February. That’s an average of 577.5 words per posting, both figures down from January but not by much. The average to date this year dropped from 587 words per post to 583.
Between the launch of Voyager 2 in 1977 and the start of March there were 3,315 posts in this blog, which drew a total of 200,487 views from 160,436 unique visitors. And they drew 5,026 comments altogether. I don’t know which one was the 5,000th. I also don’t know if that counts the ‘Pending’ ones that I’m pretty sure are spam but can’t bring myself to delete. Also a couple from people who wanted to give me a not-for-publication comment or correction.
If you’d like to be a commenter, please say something. If you’d like to be a reader, please read. The RSS feed for my essays is this link. Or you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper-right corner of this page, and get it in your WordPress reader. You can also use the subscription box to get posts e-mailed to you in that narrow window between my scheduled post and my first round of typo corrections. I don’t do anything with your e-mails besides have WordPress send out posts, but I can’t say anything about what WordPress does with them. Sorry.
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