I enjoy reviewing a month’s readership figures, normally at the month’s end. So this is a good chance to look over January’s postings. It was another month in which my readership declined, a steady process since October, when Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail debuted.
Still. There were 5,082 pages viewed here in January 2021. That’s a good bit above the twelve-month running mean of 4,686.8 views per month, and above the running median of 4,286.5. These came from 3,094 unique visitors, also above the running mean of 2,767.4 visitors and running median of 2,479.5. All I need to stay popular is for story comics to go on looking weird. So I’m rooting for the Macanudo cartoonist take over Spider-Man.
There were 143 things liked in January, beating the running mean of 100.4 and running median of 99.5 likes per month. And there were even 48 comments — I’m surprised by that number too — well above the mean of 32.7 and median of 36.5 comments per month. It’s my chattiest month since, well, November, although some of that is comments I didn’t reply to before Sunday night. That’ll go in to boosting February’s numbers, though.

My most popular posts were all about why various comic strips (Mark Trail, Mallard Fillmore, Heart of the City) look different. They got new artists. Well, Mallard Fillmore, the old artist came back, I’m told; I’m not reading it. The most popular posts published in either December or January were:
- How December 2020 Treated My Humor Blog
- I don’t know who this Sarah Rose writing Barney Google this week is either
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is Towns Ellerbee? October 2020 – January 2021
- How do you suppose the packing is going?
- Statistics 2020: How Last Year Treated My Humor Blog
And yeah, those all turn out to be January posts; nothing from December had much of a January life. My most popular Statistics Saturday post was Things From 1925 Now In The Public Domain. This shows again the value of posting something a little clickbait-y. The most popular of the long-form pieces, which have all been Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction lately, was MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter X.
I plan to keep on MiSTing The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, one chapter per week, so I’ve got something that I should be doing tonight. Statistics Saturday will keep on going you-know-when too. And for the story strip recaps, my plan is to take these strips in this order:
- Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (9 February)
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (16 February)
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (23 February)
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (2 March)
- Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (9 March)
That’s all subject to revision. There may also be extra stuff to write about Gasoline Alley come the middle of February.

82 countries or things as good as countries sent me readers in January. Here they are, and how many:
Country | Readers |
---|---|
United States | 3,573 |
United Kingdom | 188 |
Canada | 187 |
India | 180 |
Germany | 93 |
Philippines | 72 |
Australia | 62 |
Italy | 61 |
Indonesia | 45 |
Portugal | 40 |
South Africa | 37 |
Spain | 36 |
Sweden | 36 |
Finland | 33 |
Brazil | 30 |
Denmark | 30 |
Ireland | 22 |
Netherlands | 22 |
Mexico | 21 |
United Arab Emirates | 21 |
Sri Lanka | 18 |
France | 16 |
Thailand | 16 |
Norway | 15 |
Singapore | 14 |
El Salvador | 13 |
European Union | 13 |
Malaysia | 13 |
Japan | 11 |
Latvia | 11 |
Romania | 11 |
Belgium | 8 |
Argentina | 7 |
Turkey | 7 |
New Zealand | 6 |
Austria | 5 |
Mongolia | 5 |
Peru | 5 |
Russia | 5 |
South Korea | 5 |
Chile | 4 |
Colombia | 4 |
Greece | 4 |
Israel | 4 |
Nigeria | 4 |
Switzerland | 4 |
Trinidad & Tobago | 4 |
China | 3 |
Czech Republic | 3 |
Serbia | 3 |
Ukraine | 3 |
Barbados | 2 |
Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2 |
Ecuador | 2 |
Egypt | 2 |
Hong Kong SAR China | 2 |
Hungary | 2 |
Iceland | 2 |
Jamaica | 2 |
Maldives | 2 |
Pakistan | 2 |
Panama | 2 |
Poland | 2 |
Puerto Rico | 2 |
Qatar | 2 |
Saudi Arabia | 2 |
Taiwan | 2 |
Venezuela | 2 |
Vietnam | 2 |
Bahrain | 1 (***) |
Bangladesh | 1 |
Belize | 1 |
Croatia | 1 |
Kenya | 1 |
Lebanon | 1 |
Liberia | 1 |
Macedonia | 1 |
Oman | 1 |
Palestinian Territories | 1 |
Senegal | 1 |
Slovenia | 1 (*) |
Tanzania | 1 |
13 of them were single-view countries, way down from December’s 23. Slovenia was a single-view country two months in a row. Bahrain’s on four months in a row. Nobody else has a streak going.
Between the debut of that awful 1990s Land of the Lost TV show and the start of February 2021, I’ve posted 2,922 things here. They gathered in all 212,601 views from a logged 120,599 unique visitors. WordPress things I published 20,866 words over the month, for an average of 673.1 words per post. Watch this post mess that all up.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, I don’t know how this post convinced you. But you can add my essays feed here to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader, sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can then add my, or any, RSS feed through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn. And if you’re on WordPress you should be able to click “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” and have it in the Reader you mean to look at more than you do.
Thanks for reading, or at least letting the page load so it looks to me like a page view. Take care, please.