Statistics March: How Much People Want Me To Explain Comic Strips To Them

For most of March I put a lot of time into the Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing, an ill-defined matchup of items. I figure to do four more of these, so there can be sixteen pairs, which I only just now realize is half the number of first-round contests in the actual March Madness. Well, too late now. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed doing these a lot. It’s fun thinking of good Dadaist pairs, and coming up with two quick jokes on the topics has felt like a good exercise. It’s been a relief, too; as sometimes happens, the tightness of the format makes it easier to write.

Ah, but does anybody else like it? And from looking over WordPress’s statistics, the evidence is people kind of tolerate it. The system records me as having had 4,985 page views in March. This reinforces how I should hit refresh from a private-browsing account fifteen more times each month. This is below my twelve-month running mean, for the months leading up to March 2022, of 5,259.0 views in a month. It’s also a second straight month of decline. However, it is above the twelve-month median, which was 4,585 page views.

There were 2,888 unique visitors, which again is below the twelve-month running mean of 3,087.3 visitors. But it’s also above the running median of 2,616.5. This is all consistent with a slow rise in popularity, muddled by January 2022 having been an unusually popular month around here. That popularity was likely spurred by Mary Worth, which teased us all with the prospect of Wilbur Weston dying in a cruise ship accident. Well, tomorrow I expect to recap Mary Worth again, but sorry to say, Wilbur Weston won’t be dead for it.

Bar chart of two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After a peak in April 2021 the months have been hovering around 4500 views per month, without strong direction one way or another. After a local peak in January 2022 readership has declined month-to-month, but stayed above the typical figure for the past year. — Of course the story comics give me a lot of readership, but I am wondering what’s going to happen when I run out of those 1960s King Features Popeye cartoons. And what’ll I review after that? Cartoons people like, instead? … Probably not that.

Still, I can always find something more ambiguous in the data. There were 140 likes given here, in March, which is below both the mean of 153.8 an the median of 154.5. And there were 26 comments given, which is great compared to my mathematics blog. But it’s less than half the usual, where the mean was 60.3 and the median 56.3. This despite the head-to-head nature of the Pairwise Brackety Contest. I’d have imagined that would inspire jumping on to the joke. I always fear that my jokes are too closed, but I also don’t know another way to write.

Here are the five most popular posts from March. There were a couple posts from before March even more popular, mostly people who wanted the goings-on in Judge Parker explained. We’ll get there soon enough.

And my plan for this month’s plot recaps for story comics is these strips, in this order:

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (5 April)
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (12 April)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (19 April)
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (26 April)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker> (3 May)

This is a pretty high concentration of the strips people really want to know about. I’ve thought some about rearranging the strips to spread the popular things out, but I’m not sure that I could do much better. Dick Tracy hasn’t been a huge attention-getter lately, but it has some hot streaks, you know?

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. — Hey, it’s an inverse map of the Non-Aligned Movement countries!

There were 81 countries, or things like countries, sending me readers in March. That’s down from 90. Thirteen of them were single-view countries. That’s down from 24. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,466
Canada	207
Brazil	180
India	165
United Kingdom	146
Australia	101
Germany	68
Italy	66
Philippines	58
Hungary	38
Spain	32
Sweden	27
Denmark	20
Egypt	20
France	19
Singapore	19
European Union	18
Finland	18
Ireland	18
Czech Republic	17
Nigeria	17
Mexico	14
Norway	13
Austria	11
Saudi Arabia	11
Japan	10
Kenya	10
Belgium	9
South Africa	9
Malaysia	8
Netherlands	8
Taiwan	8
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Indonesia	7
Jamaica	7
Poland	7
Serbia	7
Turkey	7
Greece	6
Macedonia	6
New Zealand	6
Thailand	6
Ecuador	5
United Arab Emirates	5
El Salvador	4
Guatemala	4
Peru	4
South Korea	4
Argentina	3
Bulgaria	3
Colombia	3
Malawi	3
Mauritius	3
Papua New Guinea	3
Switzerland	3
Costa Rica	2
Croatia	2
Estonia	2
Israel	2
Lebanon	2
Pakistan	2
Portugal	2
Puerto Rico	2
Romania	2
Russia	2
Slovenia	2
Sri Lanka	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1 (*)
Belarus	1
China	1
Curaçao	1
Ghana	1 (*)
Gibraltar	1
Latvia	1
Morocco	1
Nepal	1
Oman	1 (*)
Palestinian Territories	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Yemen	1

Albania, Ghana, and Oman were single-view countries in February also. No countries are on a three-month streak for sending me single views. I’m surprised to have two views from Russia as I would think they had other things on their mind than whatever the heck Wilbur Weston’s problem is. Maybe they needed the break.

WordPress calculates that I published 15,472 words in March, an average posting of 499.1 words. This gives me a year-to-date total of 49,841 words published, and an average post length of 554 words.

Between the marriage of Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart and the start of April I’ve published 3,346 things in this blog. They’ve drawn 5,052 comments over the course of 285,472 page views from 163,332 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I can’t stop you. I can help you a little bit, though. The RSS feed for essays is at this link, and if you need an RSS reader and can’t find one anywhere, try getting a free Dreamwidth account. You can add RSS feeds to your Reading page there. If you’ve got a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper right corner of this page. There’s also a box to have posts e-mailed you as they happen, and before I can edit my typos. I feel awful about that, but I’ve tried copy-editing my posts before they go up, and there’s still errors even in stuff I fixed years ago. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.