I was able to examine my readership earlier this month than I did last time around. Thank the month starting conveniently on the weekend and while I didn’t have anything else major going on. I’ve kept up my spreadsheets, too, so now I have lots of numbers with decimal points and all that to think about. Also I learn something unsettling about my most popular posts. Let’s look things over.
In August there were 3,692 recorded page views. This came from 2,201 unique visitors as far as WordPress will tell me. Both of these are increases for the last several months. More, they’re both above the twelve-month running average. The running average for page views had been 3,158.8 views from 1,804.4 unique visitors. This implies a growing popularity, which is gratifying and reassuring and all kinds of happy.

There were 127 things liked around here over month of August. The twelve-month running average was for 163.9 things to be liked each month. This implies that while more people are looking at more things, they’re not so crazy about any of it. It was another dire month for comments, also: nine posted over the month of August, below the twelve-month running average of 40.8. Well. All right, then.
I can break this down into more decimal points too. There were 31 posts published in August. It’s not the case that only stuff posted in August was viewed in August. But I can calculate the statistics-per-posting, which seems relevant since how often I post is the thing I’m most in control of. I mean apart from writing anything actually interesting.
August saw 119.1 views per posting; the twelve-month running average was 103.7. There were 65.2 visitors per posting; the running average was 59.3. There were 4.1 likes per posting; the twelve-month running average was 5.4, which makes it sound like the likability shortfall wasn’t that bad, really. There were 0.3 comments per posting, compared to a twelve-month average of 1.3, which makes it sound like I barely need a comments section at all. Hm.
The unsettling thing is in what the most-visited pages were. There were 473 pages, besides the home page, to get any views in August 2019. 186 pages got only a single view. The five most popular were dominated by What’s Going On In reports, as ever:
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did The Phantom Save Kadia’s Mother? June – August 2019
- Paul Terry cartoons: Dinner Time
- What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? September – December 2017
- What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018
- What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Judge Parker Going To Jail? February – May 2019
The most popular wholly-original-to-me content was that microfiction With The Rise Of Digital-Life Persons, which I’m quite happy about. It was a different kind of writing and I had fun doing that. My most popular long-form essay was Why I Figure You Should Write Your Own Web Browser, which is amazing because it got all its likes in the two days between its publication and the end of the month.
The unsettling thing is the second-most-popular piece of the month. That was a 2014 review of an ancient Paul Terry cartoon. It’s one of historic value, since it’s a full-sound cartoon that predates Disney’s Steamboat Willie. But it has a dead YouTube link for the cartoon itself. I can believe some weird event causing a bunch of people to look up an obscure cartoon from a forgotten animation studio and hitting my site. But one that doesn’t even have the video? I suspect some kind of shenanigan.
74 countries or things like countries sent me at least one reader in August. 14 sent me just the single reader. There’d been 70 countries sending me any reader in July and 69 in June. There’d been 20 single-view countries in July and 18 in June. Here’s the full roster:

Country | Readers |
---|---|
United States | 2,631 |
India | 235 |
Canada | 111 |
United Kingdom | 72 |
Australia | 67 |
Sweden | 67 |
Brazil | 59 |
Philippines | 45 |
Kenya | 42 |
South Africa | 25 |
Italy | 23 |
Belgium | 19 |
Finland | 17 |
Germany | 17 |
Denmark | 16 |
Mexico | 16 |
Norway | 14 |
Japan | 13 |
El Salvador | 12 |
Romania | 12 |
Spain | 12 |
Puerto Rico | 11 |
France | 9 |
European Union | 8 |
Indonesia | 7 |
Thailand | 7 |
Ireland | 6 |
Turkey | 6 |
Colombia | 5 |
Greece | 5 |
Malaysia | 5 |
Argentina | 4 |
Jamaica | 4 |
Nigeria | 4 |
Russia | 4 |
Singapore | 4 |
Slovakia | 4 |
South Korea | 4 |
Israel | 3 |
Nepal | 3 |
Netherlands | 3 |
New Zealand | 3 |
Pakistan | 3 |
Poland | 3 |
Portugal | 3 |
Saudi Arabia | 3 |
Serbia | 3 |
Switzerland | 3 |
United Arab Emirates | 3 |
Vietnam | 3 |
China | 2 |
Guam | 2 |
Honduras | 2 |
Hong Kong SAR China | 2 |
Latvia | 2 |
Lithuania | 2 |
Moldova | 2 |
Taiwan | 2 |
Ukraine | 2 |
Uruguay | 2 |
Antigua & Barbuda | 1 |
Bangladesh | 1 |
Bermuda | 1 |
Bolivia | 1 |
Brunei | 1 (*) |
Croatia | 1 (*) |
Curaçao | 1 |
Czech Republic | 1 (*) |
Georgia | 1 |
Iraq | 1 |
Oman | 1 |
Papua New Guinea | 1 |
Peru | 1 (*) |
Sri Lanka | 1 |
Brunei, Croatia, Czech Republic, and Peru were single-view countries in July also. No country’s been a single-view place for more than two months in a row just now.
What do I plan to post over the coming month? A long-form essay, Thursday evenings, Eastern Time. Then, also Statistics Saturday posts for as long as I think of silly things to categorize. And all my What’s Going On In posts, published Sunday nights Eastern Time. In particular my schedule is, barring breaking news or important surprises:
- Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy 8th of September
- Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, 15th of September
- James Allen’s Mark Trail, 22nd of September
- Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, 29th of September
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sunday continuity) 6 October
From the start of 2019 through the start of September I’d published 241 posts in all. These had a total of 140,753 words so far this year. This was 15,654 words in total in August. That is 505.0 words in the average post for August. That’s comfortably down from July’s average of 610.3, and even the year-to-date average of 582 words per post. I can sometimes be brief.
Through the start of September were 314 total comments this year, for 1.3 comments per posting. This average has held for three months now. There had been 1,221 total likes for the year, an average of 5.0 likes per posting. The average had been 5.2 at the start of August and 5.3 at the start of July.
If you’d like to read these posts regularly, you can add the https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ RSS feed to whatever reader you use. If you don’t have a reader, you can get a free Livejournal or Dreamdwidth account and put it in your Friends page there. You can also keep track of this blog in WordPress, by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page.
I am on Twitter as @Nebusj, although I haven’t been there lately. Twitter’s server has refused all connections from my web browser (Safari) and I’ve been just this close to doing anything about that. The automated tweet-about-new-WordPress-postings hasn’t broken yet, at least, but who knows how long that will last?
Watch this space for developments, future or past. Thank you.