I enjoy taking the start of the month to look over my readership figures from the past month. Really, I like looking at bunches of numbers. Most of the video games I enjoy feature some kind of ledger that I can just watch data roll in on. If someone ever makes Multiple Entry Accounting Simulator they’re going to get all my Steam credits. I kid. I only load Steam on rare occasions, at which point the computer tells me I need to spend an hour waiting for Steam to finish its updates, after which I don’t have time to play anything anymore. So what did readership here at Another Blog, Meanwhile look like in June 2019?
It’s dropped for the third month running. I somehow expected that. It’s not as though I changed posting habits or anything, but somehow, June felt off. Maybe something in my writing came through. There were 3,140 page views from 1,813 unique visitors in June. In May there were 3,414 page views from 2,058 unique visitors. Busy April had 4,033 page views and 2,418 unique visitors. The number of views is strikingly close to the twelve-month running average before June, of 3,143.8 views. The number of unique visitors is slightly higher than the twelve-month running average of 1780. Not enough to matter.

The number of ‘likes’ fell, technically, to 130 from May’s 133. And April’s 233. This is an appreciable bit below the twelve-month running average, which was 169.3 likes per month. But at least I make up for that in comments? Which were 22 for June, compared to … 24 in May. And 10 in April. This doesn’t look too bad, relatively, until you consider the twelve-month running average was 45.2 comments per month. So 22 in June is noticeably down.
I am not sure the diagnosis here. What I make of this, and my own feelings, is that the blog is stagnating. That I need to invite in new readers, and that I need to find new kinds of things to write about. This is all quite easy to say I need to do. The problem is to find a fresh approach, and to find fresh readers for it.
Grant that the readers were here. What were they reading? 401 separate pages got at least one viewer, besides the Home Page which, naturally, drew the greatest number. (There were 377 pieces that got at least one page view in May.) 154 pages got a single reader in June. But the particular pages which drew the greatest number of views in June were:
- What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What’s With Edward’s Dog Not Being Seen? February – April 2019
- What’s Going On In Mary Worth? How can you scam a Mary Worth character? January – April 2019
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Judge Parker Going To Jail? February – May 2019
- Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending?
- What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
And that is another clean sweep in favor of comic strip explanations around here. My most popular thing that was my own attempt to be funny came in a three-way tie for 20th most popular post, Statistics Saturday: Things That Non-Vegetarians Think The Rest Of Us Need To Hear. I’m glad to have that piece thought of. I had fun writing it. My most popular long-form piece was down in 31st place, Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Gas Prices. And that … really? Huh. Not disputing anyone who enjoyed reading it. It felt to me like a piece that should have been better than it was. Maybe I accidentally search-engine-optimized the headline or first paragraph.
It all indicates, though, that very many people would like the deal with Edward’s Dog explained. Also that they feel superior to the characters in Mary Worth, which, I mean, I guess, take your self-esteem where you can get it?
So that’s what people read. Where did they read from? There were 69 countries sending me readers in June. There had been 75 in May, and 66 in April. This is the full roster:

Country | Readers |
---|---|
United States | 2,268 |
India | 177 |
Canada | 100 |
Peru | 71 |
Sweden | 65 |
United Kingdom | 61 |
Australia | 49 |
Hong Kong SAR China | 47 |
Spain | 29 |
France | 23 |
Brazil | 18 |
Italy | 17 |
Germany | 15 |
Philippines | 15 |
United Arab Emirates | 11 |
Finland | 10 |
Mexico | 8 |
Netherlands | 8 |
Turkey | 8 |
El Salvador | 7 |
Portugal | 7 |
Indonesia | 6 |
Japan | 6 |
Romania | 6 |
Singapore | 6 |
Ireland | 5 |
New Zealand | 5 |
Norway | 5 |
Russia | 5 |
South Africa | 5 |
Austria | 4 |
Colombia | 4 |
Denmark | 4 |
Malaysia | 4 |
Nepal | 4 |
Switzerland | 4 |
Taiwan | 4 |
American Samoa | 3 |
Egypt | 3 |
European Union | 3 |
Argentina | 2 |
Belgium | 2 |
Cyprus | 2 |
Ecuador | 2 |
Guatemala | 2 |
Jamaica | 2 |
Panama | 2 |
Serbia | 2 |
South Korea | 2 |
Sri Lanka | 2 |
Venezuela | 2 |
Algeria | 1 |
Bermuda | 1 |
Bolivia | 1 |
Greece | 1 (*) |
Hungary | 1 |
Iceland | 1 |
Iraq | 1 |
Kazakhstan | 1 |
Kenya | 1 |
Kuwait | 1 |
Libya | 1 |
Luxembourg | 1 |
Qatar | 1 (*) |
Réunion | 1 (*) |
Saudi Arabia | 1 |
Trinidad & Tobago | 1 |
Vietnam | 1 |
Zambia | 1 |
Greece, Qatar, and Réunion were single-reader countries in May. There were 19 single-reader countries in May and 18 single-reader countries in June.
So that is what people have been reading and where they’ve been reading from. What can they expect to read in the next couple weeks? I’m trying as ever to do a long-form comic piece once a week, posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. And a Statistics Saturday post, every Saturday evening, Eastern Time. Sunday evenings I try to post plot recaps for the story strips. My schedule for that for July is:
- Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth and will Estelle ever send riotously large amounts of money to a scam artist ever again?
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) and whether The Phantom is able to punch some animal smugglers given that Mark Trail’s busy poking for gold possibly where those cultists were poking around The Phantom’s remote and inaccessible pillar of rock.
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. and a fantastically un-seeable dog.
- Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and how the phrase “too cool for school” turned a high school into an even more terrible, vicious, clique-ridden viper pit, plus what this did to one teenage girl’s volleyball scholarship.
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker and what Judge Alan Parker is doing with himself in jail like that.
![[ Back to GRIFFY, on his quest --- he enters the MARY WORTH strip! ] Jeff, on the phone: 'What should I do? There's this oddly drawn guy here, looking for a missing girl!' Griffy: 'I need so see Mary!' [ Soon ] Griffy: 'Morning, Ms worth! I'm from th' Zippy comic! Can we talk?' Mary Worth: 'Young man, you need help, all right. Th'kind only a MENTAL HEALTH professional can provide!' (Griffy, thinking) 'Uh-oh! I'm frozen in place and unable to speak under th'withering gaze of Mary Worth!!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/bill-griffith_zippy-the-pinhead_19-august-2018.gif?w=840&h=335)
From the start of 2019 through the start of July 2019 I’ve published 179 posts, for a total of 106,178 words. This was a surprisingly few 13,906 words in June. And that’s a mere 463.5 words per post, on average. My year-to-date average post has had 593 words, down from 614 at the start of May. Those little Wednesday bits are really helping. That and having a couple things that were just photos I could post.
There were 239 comments through the start of July, an average of 1.3 comments per posting. At the start of June the average had been 1.4 comments per posting. There’ve been an average 5.3 likes per post this year, through the start of July. Through the start of June the average had been 5.5. See what I mean, above, about having maybe stagnated and needing to find new audiences?
July started with my having made 2,341 total posts. They’ve attracted 128,455 page views from 71,471 unique visitors. 401 pages got at least one view, up from May’s 377, down from April’s 565. I don’t know yet what the normal range of fluctuations should be.
If you would like to read Another Blog, Meanwhile, at your convenience and without my being able to tell you do it, please add it to your RSS reader tool using this link. Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. And on Twitter I’m @Nebusj, and I found another rabbit to photograph for the start of the month.
This one was going about having an afternoon snack at the Fantasy Island amusement park near Buffalo, New York. It was a very rainy day, part of a very rainy weekend, in a very rainy week, of a very rainy month. We got on all the roller coasters.