Statistics May: How Twitter Knocked Out My Readership Last Month

I have not used my @Nebusj account on Twitter in years. Safari decided it wanted to interact with it very slow, if at all, and while I could have just used Firefox instead I didn’t. Since that time, all I’ve tweeted there has been from an automated post relay that WordPress offers. Well, recently, Elon J Fudd, Billionaire, who owns a mansion and a web site, decided to charge way lots more for the tools to run this service. And the service said, ‘nah’, and shut down in the middle of the month. So my biggest act of promoting myself, letting this automated tweet go out once a day, vanished mid-month.

So this should explain why my readership was way down in May. According to WordPress there were 4,451 page views here in May, the lowest monthly total in a year. And there were a mere 2,537 unique visitors, also the lowest monthly total in a year. Seems easy to explain, doesn’t it? The loss of that link sank me below the 5,385.5 views and 2,905 unique visitors I’d have expected as the median monthly readership. Or the 5,510.3 views and 2,975.2 views and visitors of the arithmetic mean month. Easy!

Bar chart of two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. After a peak in April 2021 the months hovering around 4500 views per month, without strong direction one way or another, until a new peak emerged in April 2022. A smaller peak reappeared in August 2022 and September 2022. Readership totals drop again in May 2023. — It bothers me that I didn’t get to take the snapshot one minute sooner, so I wouldn’t have the empty bar of June 2023 hanging around the right there. But no, I don’t have any reason to think I’m not basically neurotypical, why do you ask?

Only maybe not so. WordPress lets me look at readership figures by day, by week, and by month, and the daily and weekly figures have a weird result. They don’t look much different before May 16th — the Twitter cutoff — and after. The two full weeks after the 16th were busier than the two full weeks before. If I am missing “deserved” readers, it looks more like because I didn’t have an extraordinary peak week, like I did around Easter with the Easter-egg-dye-color report. Well, not every month can be me patiently explaining to readers that no, The Phantom is not dead.

What was most popular around here in May? Me admitting I only got this one Far Side in 2020. But of the things published in May, here’s the top five viewed pieces:

And, of course, what people consistently want to know about are the story comics and what’s happening in them. My plan for the next couple weeks is to cover these comics, in this order:

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (13 June)
Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye (20 June)
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (27 June)
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (4 July)
Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 July)

I’m still experimenting with Olive and Popeye as part of the rotation; I’m not sure it has quite enough story to deserve this. But I’ve been rooting for Popeye to return to the pop culture so will give him a chance. I’m also really, really thinking about doing Rip Haywire recaps. Going to have to see if I can do a test run on that.

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. — Again, I’m sorry the map isn’t larger, but for some reason WordPress thinks the important thing is having plenty of whitespace on their maps.

There were 88 things as good as countries sending me readers in May. Here’s who they were:

Country	Readers
United States	2,997
India	142
Canada	137
Australia	120
Brazil	113
United Kingdom	113
Germany	106
Italy	69
Philippines	62
Finland	41
Norway	38
Spain	35
France	32
Mexico	32
Poland	28
Sweden	27
Romania	21
Bangladesh	19
Japan	19
Denmark	18
Argentina	15
Netherlands	14
South Africa	14
El Salvador	12
New Zealand	11
Peru	11
Thailand	10
European Union	9
Portugal	9
Hong Kong SAR China	8
Malaysia	8
Nigeria	8
Serbia	8
United Arab Emirates	7
Colombia	6
Croatia	6
Israel	6
Morocco	6
Belgium	5
Ireland	5
Jamaica	5
Kenya	5
Ukraine	5
Algeria	4
Greece	4
Indonesia	4
Puerto Rico	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Singapore	4
Austria	3
Dominican Republic	3
Ecuador	3
Georgia	3
Russia	3
Venezuela	3
Albania	2
American Samoa	2
Bahamas	2
Bulgaria	2
Chile	2
Costa Rica	2
Estonia	2
Hungary	2
Kuwait	2
Mali	2
Palestinian Territories	2
Seychelles	2
Slovenia	2
South Korea	2
Antigua & Barbuda	1
Armenia	1
Bolivia	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Egypt	1
French Polynesia	1 (*)
Guatemala	1
Honduras	1
Martinique	1
Oman	1
Pakistan	1
Slovakia	1
Sri Lanka	1 (*)
Switzerland	1
Taiwan	1
Tunisia	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

I agree, that’s way more readers from Sweden and from Argentina than I would expect. Once again, I’m never going to turn away a reader, but I feel myself such a provincial interest I’m stunned I Have anything to say that could interest anyone in Bangladesh.

Pakistan and Sri Lanka were single-view countries in April 2023 too. I didn’t keep track of what single-view countries were in March. Sorry.

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, I’m sorry the last bit of my Twitter presence is gone. You can sign up to get posts delivered by e-mail, using the little box in the upper right corner that says ”Follow _Another Blog, Meanwhile_ via Email”. Or you can use the button above that to add this blog to your WordPress reader. You can use https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed in your RSS reader to get essays in a nice, organized fashion in your own reader, too. Please choose as fits your needs. I’ll be around a while yet.