Statistics July: Some Round Numbers

I do like looking at my readership figures, once a month, as it’s a convenient way for me to think that I should be more popular. It also lets me lay out what my plans are for the coming month. This plan is always that I’m going to keep recapping the plots in the story strips, since that’s always the most popular thing I post. Let me start with that, come to think of it. My schedule for the coming weeks is to describe the goings-on in:

• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (9th of August)
• Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (16th of August)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (23rd of August)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (30th of August)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (37th of August)

Going to be a fun month. The Dick Tracy-to-Mary Worth swing is a bunch of strips people are often asking Google about. And, you know, people have been hopping mad about Mary Worth lately, and we’re getting more Wilbur Weston in, my readership prospects are good.

Once again I didn’t get a snapshot exactly at the end of June because I was doing things. But they were different things that I was doing than I was doing at the end of June. I bet the end of this month I get the screenshot exactly on the dot, though. Who ever heard of doing a thing on a Wednesday?

To the specifics, though. There were, WordPress says, 4,727 page views here in July. That’s just five fewer than there were in June. This is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,082.3 views per month, although that figure’s skewed a bit by the spike of readers in April. It is above the running median of 4,585 views per month, suggesting a bit of general growth overall.

There were 2,700 recorded unique visitors, again down a bit from June, but in line with the averages. The running mean for the twelve months leading up to July saw 2,714.6 unique visitors each month. The running median was 2,616.5.

There were 100 likes given around here in July, a second suspiciously round number. This is the first one that looks a bit sad, as it’s below the mean of 154.1 and median of 154.5 likes given in a month on average. And the number of comments — 26 — was similarly way below the running mean of 56.5 and median of 51.5. The implication is that people may see my writings more as something to read than as something to engage with. And that’s not bad, really, as I’ve struggled to engage with things myself lately. Hi, every WordPress blog I’m subscribed to but have left comments in as recently as never.

Despite the lower numbers of likes and comments, stuff got read a good bit around here. These are the posts from July with the greatest number of views, in descending order:

• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Who’s writing Gil Thorp now? April – July 2022
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s drawing Judge Parker now? May – July 2022
• Statistics June: How Much People Wish I Could Have Done Something More About Mary Worth Last Month
• Maybe I’ll Get Into Corporate Logo Design
• In Which I Expect Light Shenanigans With Scattered Tomfoolery

I do expect a Gil Thorp surge for a couple months now, while new author Henry Barajas establishes things like that Gil Thorp flies now and has an unsettled home life.

I look at a map like this and I think is it possible to have at least one country in red for each line of longitude, the whole world round? It’s got to require Greenland to do, right? Anyway so if this is your first encounter with my writing, this photo caption is a good representative one.

81 countries or things as good as countries sent me readers in July, down-ish from June’s 82. 20 of them got a single page view, though, up from 16. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,546
India	169
Canada	152
United Kingdom	136
Australia	98
Italy	67
Germany	53
Brazil	38
France	32
South Africa	25
Singapore	22
Serbia	21
Austria	18
Philippines	18
Denmark	17
Finland	16
Pakistan	16
Poland	16
Spain	14
Sweden	14
Norway	13
Belgium	11
Jamaica	11
Iraq	10
Ireland	10
Japan	10
Mexico	10
Switzerland	10
Netherlands	8
New Zealand	8
Nigeria	8
Croatia	7
Peru	7
El Salvador	6
Argentina	5
Malaysia	5
Portugal	5
Romania	5
Bangladesh	4
Barbados	4
Colombia	4
Greece	4
Israel	4
Russia	4
Saudi Arabia	4
South Korea	4
Thailand	4
Tunisia	4
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Czech Republic	3
Hungary	3
Vietnam	3
Chile	2
Georgia	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Indonesia	2
Macedonia	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Turkey	2
Ukraine	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Algeria	1
Cambodia	1
Cameroon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Ecuador	1
Egypt	1
Fiji	1
Honduras	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1 (**)
Lebanon	1
Lithuania	1
Mongolia	1
Morocco	1
Namibia	1
Nepal	1
Oman	1
Qatar	1
Taiwan	1
Venezuela	1

Kuwait has given me a single view for three months in a row now. No other country has been a single-view country more than one month in a row. Greenland has resumed not being a country that looks at me at all.

WordPress calculates that I posted 17,264 words in July, an average 556.9 per posting. This is down a little and brings my year-to-date average to 563 words per posting. I’m at 119,411 words posted for the year, as of the start of August.

Between the development of the lunar rovers and the start of August I’ve had 307,659 page views here, from a recorded 174,357 unique visitors. Who’ll be number 175,000? I don’t know. Probably someone from Greenland.

If you’d like your chance at being that reader from Greenland, though, good luck! The best route to reading my essays is to add the RSS feed for my essays to your reader. If you don’t have a reader, but you do have a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. If you don’t have a WordPress account, you can use the box beneath that to get uncorrected and typeo-ridden posts e-mailed to you the moment they’re published. Or you can just click on a page that looks good and read that. Whatever’s brought you here to read this you could do again tomorrow. And maybe the rest of this month as I finally run out of 1960s Popeye cartoons to watch. I know, I’m baffled that could happen too.