Statistics May: How I Am Punished For My Bad Blogging Etiquette

Before I dive into May 2024’s statistics an explanation for something anyone who comments here has noticed. I do my best to answer comments when they arrive, but I’m also bad at it. I get into this complex where I realize I should answer this when I have a moment, and then it’s bedtime and I figure to get it the next morning, but there’s things to do then too, and so I’ll get to it in a moment with some even better response, and you see how that escalates. Usually I try and get some response done by the end of the month at least — these statistics posts do make me self-discipline some — but this May, it failed altogether.

And now, a month-plus behind in some cases, I have to just apologize and walk away from a mess of a month, comment-wise. I apologize to everyone who’s been good enough to write to me. I read your comments, and I think about them, and you deserve a response and I just flopped instead of doing them. I hope to do better now that I’ve taken the shame and declared blog-writer bankruptcy like this.

My confession made, now, let’s look around WordPress’s statistics about my readership the past month. WordPress figures there were 4,963 pages viewed here in May, which is the first tiem since last September that this dropped below five thousand. The twelve-month running mean of page views leading up to May was 5,735 per month, and the running median 5,431.5. So it was a down month by any measure there.

Yeah so last month? When I asked why my readership shot up and then declined in alternating months and I wondered why not commit to one way or the other? I didn’t mean to commit to declining like that, sorry.

It was also a down month in the number of unique visitors, which was below three thousand for the first time since September. The running mean there is 3,328.4 visitors per month, and the running median 3,059 per month. So not terribly below average, but below it anyway.

The most predictable result of the month is that comments were way below average. I know it seems like they always were, but this month especially: 17 were given to me, against a running mean of 56.1 and median of 55.5. That’s a low not reached since February 2020. Even if I hd managed to squeeze out at least some reply by the end of the 31st and juiced that up to 34 comments … well, it would have been below average, but not historically low. Just, like, lower than anything since March 2024.

The anomaly of the month is in likes issued. There were 126 items that got liked by someone or other in May, the highest count since last June and noticeably above the mean of 98.9 and median of 98.5. One can conclude people like my embarrassed silence. And what was most-liked here, in May? Me confessing I only just got this one Far Side strip. But among things published in May that got well-liked this past month, the top five were:

• Statistics April: In Which People Look To Me For Something Not Comic-Strip-Related
• Here’s Something That Seems to Avoid Comics Kingdom’s Newest Broken-Ness
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Why are Gil Thorp characters addressing the reader? February – May 2024
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Did ‘Ann Parker’ kill that guy? February – May 2024
• It’s Not That Albany Is Fearsome, It’s Just You Have Enough Problems Without Them

Incidentally my most recent testing suggests that Comics Kingdom overcame the specific broken-ness I was warning people about there. At least the last couple days I’ve tried the ‘more comics’ button at the bottom of my favorites page and gotten more comics, as should be. They never responded to my bug report, of course.

I don’t know why my Statistics April report was so popular. Some time I’m going to have to do a test of posting, just, lists of links or countries or whatever and see if that’s attracting people. It might be that bots like stuff which looks like content aggregation. Well, my plan for aggregating content, in the form of turning three months’ worth of comic strips into like 800 words of plot summary without any of the satisfaction of reading a story, is this, for the month ahead:

• Tony DePaul and Bret Blevins’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (4 June)
• Mike Curtis, Charles Ettinger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 June)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (18 June)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (25 June)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (32 June)

I too am looking forward to explaining how much of Gasoline Alley the last couple months was repeating the previous plot in Gasoline Alley only as a dream sequence.

This month in fascinating discoveries of countries that used to exist: Neutral Moresnet, a sliver of land that the Netherlands and then Belgium and Germany couldn’t quite bring themselves to fight over during the 19th century because there was just enough zinc there to be interesting. And you know, when you’re interesting enough for zinc, you’re interesting enough for anything. In this case, to go from the zinc running out to, at the behest of a local stamp collector, becoming the first Esperanto-speaking state in the world and “capital” of the world’s Esperanto community. So that’s nice.

There were 92 countries, or things like contries, sending me views in May. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,708
Canada	212
United Kingdom	184
India	89
Australia	85
Brazil	56
Germany	54
Italy	37
Philippines	37
South Korea	33
South Africa	27
Finland	26
Bulgaria	23
France	22
Netherlands	20
Malaysia	17
Japan	15
New Zealand	15
Indonesia	13
Saudi Arabia	13
Spain	13
Sweden	13
Kenya	10
Mexico	10
Portugal	10
Switzerland	10
Belgium	9
Ireland	9
Denmark	8
European Union	8
Thailand	8
Iceland	7
Israel	7
Kuwait	7
Russia	7
Ukraine	7
Austria	6
Puerto Rico	6
Greece	5
Maldives	5
Pakistan	5
Colombia	4
Iraq	4
Jamaica	4
Nigeria	4
Peru	4
Singapore	4
Taiwan	4
Algeria	3
American Samoa	3
Bangladesh	3
Chile	3
Czechia	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Latvia	3
Morocco	3
Norway	3
Poland	3
Romania	3
Turkey	3
Venezuela	3
Vietnam	3
Argentina	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Ghana	2
Honduras	2
Montenegro	2
Serbia	2
Tunisia	2
Belarus	1
Bolivia	1
Costa Rica	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
El Salvador	1 (***)
Gibraltar	1
Guatemala	1
Guinea	1
Hungary	1
Jordan	1 (*)
Kazakhstan	1
Kosovo	1 (*)
Lebanon	1 (*)
Macao SAR China	1 (*)
Malta	1 (*)
North Macedonia	1
Oman	1
Panama	1
Paraguay	1
Qatar	1
Slovenia	1
Tanzania	1
United Arab Emirates	1

Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Macao, and Malta were all single-view countries in April. El Salvador has been one view a month for four months in a row now. I don’t know what the deal is there. But that was 23 single-view countries for the month of May, about the same as the 25 from April. I, too, note the lack of views from “Unknown Region”, which I take to mean the Commander of the Jungle Patrol skipped me for a couple weeks.

WordPress estimates that I started the month at about 243,746 views from a total of 245,047 unique visitors. Those sound like numbers to me, too. It is of the opinion I published 15,553 words over the month, which is the median of my monthly writing count for the year so far. My average post came in at 501.7 words for May, and for the year to date has come in at 523 words.

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