With the old year pretty well finished off it’s also a good time to look back at the readership figures for it. And yes, I put up with having to go to a whole other web browser because WordPress broke a something.
WordPress tells me, finally, that there were 70,038 page views in 2022. That’s the largest number I’ve had in any single year, and is nearly 10,000 more than I had in 2021. The change alone is more page views than I had in all 2014, when I thought things were going pretty well. You probably thought that about 2014 too.
There were 36,714 unique visitors around here in 2022. That’s a slight growth from 2021’s count of 26,061. Not sure why so few. That’s the smallest increase in unique visitors since 2016, when my visitor count dropped compared to 2015. There were 1,790 likes given to things in 2022, barely up from 2021’s 1,768. Still, that’s my most-liked year since 2018, which I’ll take.
And there were 718 comments given in 2022, again technically an increase from 2021, when there were 700. And similarly this was the greatest number of comments since 2018. So this thing where Garrison and I keep talking to each other instead of anything else is good for my feeling of accomplishment, at least.
As I’d said, people really like to see my complaining about comic strips. Or at least doing plot recaps. Take a look at the ten most popular things published in 2022 and see if you notice anything in common about them:
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Is anything real happening in The Phantom? February – May 2022
- Sherman’s Lagoon is on GoComics now, not Comics Kingdom
- What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Who’s writing Gil Thorp now? April – July 2022
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did Captain Savarna have kids with The Phantom? May – July 2022
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is Savarna trying to destroy The Phantom? December 2021 – February 2022
- What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why does everybody want Wilbur dead? October 2021 – January 2022
- Why Is Everyone Mad at _Funky Winkerbean_?
- Why I Am Angry at Funky Winkerbean, Yes, Again
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April angry the show she wanted made got made? November 2021 – February 2022
- Judge Parker and The Phantom look odd because Mike Manley isn’t drawing them
Going farther down the list of articles I find that while I may have written something that wasn’t related to Funky Winkerbean, I couldn’t prove it. When I got away from that, I was complaining about Comics Kingdom making the Sunday strips illegible, or that time GoComics blew up their own servers for a week and pretended nothing happened. (I still haven’t heard any reports on what went wrong back in early November there.) My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was 60s Popeye: Ballet de Spinach, a cartoon without spinach in it. Why? It’s an okay enough cartoon and an okay enough review but what is the appeal there? Maybe people really want to see Popeye in a tutu and this is what they’ve got?
Anyway my most popular creative piece — and this is going down a long way, I swear — was MiSTed: Safety First (part 1 of 16). The other parts aren’t that much less popular, it’s just this is way down the list.
There were 153 countries or country-like things sending me page views in 2022. Here’s the roster. Yes, it includes Greenland, one of my big ambitions.
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 47,234 |
| Finland | 3,530 |
| Australia | 2,974 |
| India | 2,294 |
| Canada | 2,154 |
| United Kingdom | 1,907 |
| Italy | 908 |
| Brazil | 907 |
| Germany | 723 |
| Philippines | 621 |
| Sweden | 419 |
| Spain | 406 |
| France | 359 |
| Japan | 264 |
| Norway | 264 |
| Nigeria | 245 |
| South Africa | 226 |
| Ireland | 214 |
| Singapore | 188 |
| Peru | 165 |
| Mexico | 164 |
| Denmark | 159 |
| Austria | 143 |
| Romania | 142 |
| Netherlands | 141 |
| Thailand | 141 |
| Bulgaria | 132 |
| El Salvador | 125 |
| Malaysia | 125 |
| Portugal | 118 |
| Serbia | 113 |
| New Zealand | 102 |
| Indonesia | 95 |
| Saudi Arabia | 94 |
| Czech Republic | 84 |
| Turkey | 84 |
| Belgium | 83 |
| Switzerland | 83 |
| Pakistan | 81 |
| Argentina | 80 |
| Colombia | 78 |
| Poland | 76 |
| Hungary | 75 |
| Russia | 74 |
| Kenya | 72 |
| Greece | 66 |
| Egypt | 65 |
| European Union | 64 |
| Taiwan | 63 |
| Chile | 57 |
| United Arab Emirates | 56 |
| South Korea | 54 |
| Vietnam | 54 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 47 |
| Jamaica | 47 |
| Bahrain | 44 |
| Croatia | 43 |
| Ecuador | 40 |
| Israel | 38 |
| Costa Rica | 30 |
| Venezuela | 30 |
| Bangladesh | 28 |
| Sri Lanka | 26 |
| Iraq | 24 |
| Macedonia | 24 |
| Ukraine | 22 |
| Barbados | 21 |
| Kuwait | 19 |
| Puerto Rico | 18 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 17 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 16 |
| Slovenia | 16 |
| Guatemala | 15 |
| Cyprus | 14 |
| Estonia | 14 |
| Dominican Republic | 13 |
| Lebanon | 12 |
| Nepal | 12 |
| China | 11 |
| Lithuania | 11 |
| Slovakia | 11 |
| Albania | 10 |
| Mauritius | 10 |
| Jordan | 9 |
| Latvia | 9 |
| Uruguay | 9 |
| Azerbaijan | 8 |
| Montenegro | 8 |
| Tunisia | 7 |
| Bahamas | 6 |
| Honduras | 6 |
| Cambodia | 5 |
| Cameroon | 5 |
| Ethiopia | 5 |
| Luxembourg | 5 |
| Malta | 5 |
| Oman | 5 |
| Qatar | 5 |
| Uganda | 5 |
| Belarus | 4 |
| Bolivia | 4 |
| Kosovo | 4 |
| Mauritania | 4 |
| Mongolia | 4 |
| Morocco | 4 |
| Namibia | 4 |
| Papua New Guinea | 4 |
| Suriname | 4 |
| U.S. Virgin Islands | 4 |
| American Samoa | 3 |
| Armenia | 3 |
| Kazakhstan | 3 |
| Malawi | 3 |
| Panama | 3 |
| Algeria | 2 |
| Anguilla | 2 |
| Fiji | 2 |
| Georgia | 2 |
| Ghana | 2 |
| Guadeloupe | 2 |
| Guam | 2 |
| Isle of Man | 2 |
| Libya | 2 |
| Palestinian Territories | 2 |
| Uzbekistan | 2 |
| Antigua & Barbuda | 1 |
| Belize | 1 |
| Brunei | 1 |
| Congo – Brazzaville | 1 |
| Congo – Kinshasa | 1 |
| Cook Islands | 1 |
| Côte d’Ivoire | 1 |
| Cuba | 1 |
| Curaçao | 1 |
| Gambia | 1 |
| Gibraltar | 1 |
| Greenland | 1 |
| Guinea | 1 |
| Guyana | 1 |
| Iceland | 1 |
| Lesotho | 1 |
| Liechtenstein | 1 |
| Macau SAR China | 1 |
| Madagascar | 1 |
| Maldives | 1 |
| Mozambique | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 |
| Somalia | 1 |
| St. Lucia | 1 |
| Unknown Region | 1 |
| Yemen | 1 |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
Not to get all giddy about my own numbers, but the 47,234 visitors from the United States is grater than the total number of page views through to 2019. This really shows what talking so much about comic strips will do for me. And my but I’d like to know more about that ‘Unknown Region’.
WordPress tells me I published 209,826 words in 2022, for a words-per-posting average of 575. This is a pretty big drop from 2021, probably because I’m posting shorter segments of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. There were an average of 4.6 likes per posting, and an average of 2.4 comments per posting, although a lot of posts didn’t get any comment at all because there’s only so much I can say about being mad at Funky Winkerbean.
So thanks for looking around as I look over myself and agree, I write a lot about Funky Winkerbean.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
The Phantom’s your bread and butter. Mine, too. He put all three of my daughters through college.
Watch for a gear shift coming up in the daily strip on February 11.
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I am amazed how many people will dig through my prose just in the hopes that someone else has jotted down the major plot points with 95% accuracy! You’ve been very good to me over the years.
I’m looking forward to the shift and do not know at all what to anticipate. Have to admit, though, a 30-month-long super-storyline where The Phantom is missing and presumed dead and there’s a lot of flashbacks and people trying to find The Phantom using vague clues and telling their narratives of what they’ve strung together? That just might let me make the leap all the way up to second-tier comics snark blogger.
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Unknown Region is probably Area 51. The Mailbox Alien is a known fan of yours, after all. Also,you picked up 21 Ukrainians, who you’d think would be more occupied at the moment then to be reading your blog.
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There are so many countries that I figure have better stuff to do than read anything I write. Not that I want to shake any of them off, and don’t want to deny anyone anything that they like. But, boy, I know how provincial I am and I just can not figure why so many people in, say, the Philippines are curious what I have to say about Saturday morning cartoons from 1982 that I’m still angry about.
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