Statistics September: People Have Questions About Judge Parker

For some reason Google decided that everyone in the world wanted to read a February 2019 What’s Going On In Judge Parker plot recap. I’m not saying they shouldn’t read it, if you want to know the goings-on of four and a half years ago. But this one essay got 1,433 views, way beyond any other particular piece. It buried this one October 2020 admission that I only that day got a particular Far Side comic.

I imagine underlying this is that Judge Parker reached a climax in its current story, with an international crimelord deciding to run for mayor of Cavelton, and Google decided people wouldn’t understand my most recent plot recap without way too much backstory. Remember, Google searches are actually more effective and correct than they’ve ever been, and you’re just imagining it that it sucks now, say Google spokescreatures, in a steady monotone and verbatim.

But those are old posts. What were the most popular things published this past month, among my readers? According to WordPress’s statistics, it’s this quintet, which had normal-looking numbers of clicks:

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. After a sudden drop in May 2023 it grew several months in a row before dropping in September 2023. It jumps to a new peak in October 2023. — Oh, also WordPress went and changed how the statistics page looks, so that it’s needlessly harder to get something like this where I look at a couple years’ worth monthly figures. But in trade for this you get … to have to fiddle around more with the stupid thing to get the same data you used to, and you can’t use the left/right arrow keys to get pictures for older months anymore.

So the Anomalous Judge Parker Google Incident juiced my statistics, giving me my fourth-highest readership month on record by page views, and my second-highest by number of unique visitors. There were 7,020 page views around here in October, way above the twelve-month running mean of 5,228.2 and twelve-month running median of 5,368. There were 4,594 unique visitors recorded, also way above the running mean of 2,846.3 and the running median of 2,836. Also hey, a rare month where the running median did not end .5, that’s comfortable.

All those readers, it won’t surprise you readers to know, didn’t do more than get a page view. There were 80 likes given around here in October, a drop from the month before and considerably under the mean of 114.6 and median of 114.5. Hey, there’s that .5 back. And there were 63 comments, a slight increase from September, but still below the mean of 80.5 (again with the .5’s) and median of 81.

I regret a little that folks have to wait so long for my next round of Judge Parker explanations. My plan for the month ahead is these strips, in this order:

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (7 November)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (14 November)
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (21 November)
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (26 November)
Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye

So first, yes, that’s a new name on Olive and Popeye; Emi Burdge has taken over the “Olive” half from Shadia Amin. Second, I do figure to fit the revived Flash Gordon in, but I haven’t decided when. It seems that it’s the same continuity, Sundays and weekdays, so that’s one less essay at least. (But the Sunday-only strips are the easy ones.)

Meanwhile, to the countries report:

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. China and most of Africa are blank. — Do you like how the map is almost big enough to be useful? It turns out if you zoom in like eight times on the page it becomes kind of useful-ish. Similarly, if you zoom in Comics Kingdom’s page like six times, you still can’t read the Sunday comics, because they never tested their page on an actual computer.

84 countries or things as good as countries sent me views in October. As ever, most of them were the United States, United Kingdom, India, or Canada. There were way more from Brazil than usual, though. Here’s the total roster:

Country	Readers
United States	5,594
Brazil	234
United Kingdom	163
Canada	140
India	131
Australia	118
Italy	117
Philippines	63
Spain	35
Germany	29
Peru	25
France	22
Mexico	21
Finland	20
Singapore	19
Sweden	18
Norway	16
South Africa	14
Thailand	14
Poland	13
Taiwan	12
Greece	10
Austria	9
Romania	9
Belgium	8
Czechia	8
Netherlands	8
Uruguay	8
Denmark	7
Ireland	7
Argentina	6
Indonesia	6
Portugal	6
Chile	5
Colombia	5
Dominican Republic	5
Russia	5
Turkey	5
Bulgaria	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
New Zealand	4
Serbia	4
Slovenia	4
South Korea	4
Switzerland	4
Trinidad & Tobago	4
Croatia	3
El Salvador	3
Israel	3
Japan	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Botswana	2
Egypt	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Venezuela	2
Aruba	1
Belize	1
Cayman Islands	1
Estonia	1 (**)
Gibraltar	1
Guatemala	1
Iran	1
Jersey	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Lithuania	1 (*)
Malaysia	1
Mali	1
Malta	1 (*)
Mongolia	1
Montenegro	1
Nepal	1
Nigeria	1
North Macedonia	1
Pakistan	1
Panama	1
Réunion	1
Sierra Leone	1
St. Lucia	1
Tanzania	1
Uganda	1
Ukraine	1

Lithuania and Malta have been single-view countries for two months now, and Estonia three. No other countries are on a longer streak.

WordPress figures I started November with a lifetime total of 391,010 page views from 220,289 unique visitors. That sounds about right to me. If you’d like to be a regular reader, apparently, just stand around some and let Google read you a Gil Thorp plot recap from 2018. I blame this on Twitter.