Friday 1 January 2016

Five Webpages, One Post

Last year, I started off 2015 with “Four Webpages, One Post”, summarizing 2014's statistics across all my blogs, etc. So, what the heck, let’s do a round up for 2015 as well! I state five webpages this time, not because I started a new website, but rather because I decided to include my personal NCF site. (I also maintain a website for the courses I teach, but why include that?)

I’m pretty sure this post will make you feel better about yourself. According to what I see on web fiction guide, my serial stats are abysmal, and I’m pretty sure most four-year-old teaching blogs out there also do way better than my math comic. I’ll try for a positive spin though.


1) PERSONAL WEBSITE


Freenet Site. Began: 90s? Info pages only. Didn’t update at all this year.
I had 2,586 hits on that site this year. I'm using this as a benchmark, given it’s a site that may register in searches or archives, but it’s doing basically zilch.


2) TAYLOR’S POLYNOMIALS


Google Site. Began: July 2011. Posts in 2015: 5. (Up 3)
Contained my math web serial until August 2012, by which point I’d migrated to the blog. Still stores my math song parodies, hence the five new posts.


Total of 1,093 sessions for all of 2015 (and 4,810 sessions all time). Also total of 2,023 page views for all of 2015 (and 14,044 page views all time). This is a change from last year when there were only 617 sessions; there were a few more parodies posted.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Well, it’s an increase. Worse than the benchmark, but I don’t post here much, so it’s fine.


3) ANY Q-BARS (MATH WEBCOMIC)


Blogger Site. Began: June 2012. Posts in 2015: 27. (Up 5)
Contained my math serial from July 2012 to May 2014. Resurrected in August 2015 as a webcomic, with a comic every Monday, plus some extras.


12,410 page views in 2015, bringing the all time total to 32,425. Over A THIRD of my views were this year. The massive spike in April 2015 (2,690 views) was someone doing an archive dive, while the lowest month was July 2015 (421 views). Tangentially, the Facebook page had 18 likes in December 2014, and it’s now at 25 likes (which allowed me to get a bookmark, mathstans).

With now 187 total posts, we’re looking at 173 views per post, higher than last year. Views HAVE been on the decline though - new posts in August regularly got over 100 views, which is now down to ~70. Which has me wondering and sighing a bit. The post “Ahead of the Curve” (from March, forecasting a return) was the most viewed at 857. I have no listed “followers” here (unlike my other blogs).

FINAL THOUGHTS: I do this page more to amuse others. It is doing better than I thought - way over the benchmark. I must remember the higher month view counts (like August) are outliers, and we then regress back down to the mean/average. I still wish I had any sort of brand recognition whatsoever, but for now, I think I can live with this.


4) MATHIEX (THIS SITE)


Blogger Site. Began: August 2012. Posts in 2015: 53 (Down 3)
Post total is slightly artificial, in that 15 of the posts were reruns of my “There Are No Dumb Questions” column, the majority of which were written for MuseHack in 2014. But even without them, there has still never been a month without a posting.


The (new) huge spike in April 2015 at 4,113 views was due to me writing an April Fool edition for someone else's piece of serial fiction. “Legion of Nothing” had been going for over six years at the time, so my post “Guessed Writing 2015” garnered 1567 views.

The prior year (2014) no month was below 2,250 views; this year (2015) February, March, May, June and September were all below 2,000 (the worst being Feb). Total of 28,747 page views for 2015, and all time total of 84,087 views. This is worse than 2014 (which had over 30k views even without January), but I did post less. I have five listed “followers” here.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Most of what I post here is for me, with maybe tips or recaps for others, so I’m fine with those numbers. Though the knowledge I will likely never again have a post as popular as “Guessed Writing” is a bit depressing.


5) MATHTANS SERIALS


Wordpress Site. Began: August 2014. Posts in 2015: 76 (Up 51)
I posted every week - even over Christmas this year. Plus bonus material. Granted, “Time & Tied” (which began in April) is more an exercise in editing and drawing than writing, but that still takes time.

What estimate would be too low for hits here? Brace yourself.


I discovered that Wordpress does an “Annual Report”: There were 2,208 page views (to a total of 2,707), with the top day being April 1st (58 views) - see my April Fool guest post remarks above. This is BAD... total views per visitor in 2015 was a mere 2.85 pages.

The posts with the most views were “The Gathering” (first epsilon proj), “Timely Discovery” (first time & tied) and Time & Tied’s “Awareness Index” - start pages, which implies no one kept reading. The only people to comment more than once were Scott D, John Golden and Education Realist. Random aside, the Time & Tied Facebook page has 6 likes.

I saw hits from 44 countries, though mostly the US (1,000+), Canada (500+) and the UK (170+). Best month was May (359 views) the month Billy Higgins wrote me a review at 'Web Fiction Guide' (WFG). Worst was September (91 views) the first time I dropped below 100 since the blog began. November was on par to be worse, but there was a surge from 'WFG' in the last week to offer advice on my site design (not the writing itself). I have 4 listed WP “followers”.

FINAL THOUGHTS: OW. I posted the MOST here and got the LEAST to show for it. Why the hell am I still writing fiction? (Because I enjoy it, natch.) SOME people out there read it... right? It’s the pictures or navigation that’s a turnoff, maybe??

Alternatively... what if WordPress simply has a more aggressive spam filter? What if these numbers are the only TRUE ones, as they remove all the hits from bots and the like, which Blogger includes? What if my whole online life is a lie?! ... Surely not.


BONUS: TWITTER STATS


My best Tweet was Oct 20th, it got 43 RTs and 56 Faves (not likes) because it was ReTweeted by “FiveThirtyEight”. It wasn’t for my stuff (it was on “World Statistics Day”), but I even got my tweet on their site, brought to my attention by David Petro, so that was neat.

A week ago, I used one of the Twitter Apps that determines who mentioned me the most in 2015. (Might have been only the latter half of 2015, it was a bit unclear.) Here were those results:

Not quite 600 mentions overall, so between that and the small number of likes on Facebook, it would seem social media is not working for me.

So, that’s where we’re at! In total, I posted OVER 150 TIMES THIS YEAR. If we're searching for positives, that’s not bad. If the webcomic site continues alongside the serial site this year, it may end up being about the same for 2016, so hopefully I can at the least maintain the viewing numbers too? What do you think?

Farewell to 2015, all the best to you in 2016.

3 comments:

  1. I'm writing my retrospective, and you make me feel depressingly unproductive. I do have better traffic, but you produce at levels I can only gasp at.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! One thing to bear in mind is (from what I can recall) your posts tend to be longer. Likely have more in depth analysis too. I fact I just had a look at your retrospective - didn't realize we'd been at this roughly the same number of years - and you seem to have identified your possible points of paralysis. Keep at it! I suppose I'll do the same, people have to notice me eventually, right?

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  2. I think they will. I hope they will. Advice: Stop navel-gazing one out of five, look outwards. It's hard, trust me.

    ReplyDelete