Friday 2 January 2015

Four Webpages, One Post

I'm seeing a bunch of people wrapping up 2014 with a post summarizing their stats. That sort of thing tends to make me feel inadequate, as generally others seem to get more traffic, but possibly that's an illusion. So, what the heck, here's my statistics, reaching as far back into the past as I can. If my inadequacy is illusion, let me know, and if it's not, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're doing better than I am.


We can't all be right - or can we?

Of course, as the title says, I manage 4 webpages. Five if you include my personal page. Six if you include my course website. So let's break it down, starting with the oldest.


TAYLOR'S POLYNOMIALS


Google Site. Began: July 2011. Posts in 2014: 2.
Contained my math web serial until August 2012, by which point I'd migrated to the blog. Contained the index pages until personified math folded. Still houses my song parodies.
In the beginning, it updated twice every week for over a year. I don't recall why there was a spike (of 421) in Sept 2011. Bit of a spike in Sept 2013 too. Total of 617 sessions for all of 2014, and 3,719 sessions all time.


TAYLOR'S POLYNOMIALS (MATHTANS)


Blogger Site. Began: June 2012. Posts in 2014: 22.
Continued my math web serial until May 2014, when I ended it.
In the beginning, it updated twice every week. In 2014, it scaled back to once per week, until it ended. The peak was in November 2013 (1,264 views). October 2014 spiked up with more views than January 2014 for no reason I can fathom. All time total of 20,042 page views. (With 160 total posts, an average of 125 per post, but many of the between-arc posts skew that.)


MATHIEX (THIS SITE!)


Blogger Site. Began: August 2012. Posts in 2014: 56.
It's been reinvented a few times, but there's never been a month without a posting.
The peak in January 2014 (over 5,000) is artificial, that's when I went through and updated all my tags, and for whatever reason (bots?) they counted as hits. July 2014 is the real high mark, at 4,005 page views, when I had 18 posts. What baffles me is no month for 2014 was below 2,250 views - even if I had only one post that month. If only my web serial had been so lucky. All time total of 55,465 page views. (With 174 total posts - not including this one - that's 319 per post... which is weird, since aside from CMEF at 611 and TrigGate at 417, everything else is below 340.)


MATHTANS SERIAL


Wordpress Site. Began: August 2014. Posts in 2014: 24.
My new web serial, not math related. Has updated once every week without fail (except over Christmas).
There were 499 views before January, over the four months it existed. So there's a while to go yet.

I suppose there's enough evidence to say that my mathematics web serial wasn't as much of a failure as I thought, given how it's still getting some hits. Even so, the lack of engagement was enough to make me move on at the time. I'm also sure I'm misinterpreting some of the data; Facebook also tends to taunt me with messages like the following every few months, despite the Math-Tans page having only 18 likes:

Anyway, if you're doing better than me on stats, pat yourself on the back. If you're not doing better than me, perhaps it's an issue of volume. If it's not that - keep at it, we all had to start somewhere.

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