Thank You Readers For Being So Engaged!

The Readers Of This Blog Comment A Lot

At this blog, there are 1.50 comments per day, on average.

At Wash Park Prophet, there are 0.35 comments per day, on average.

I am very thorough in removing spam comments from both this blog and its sister blog Wash Park Prophet, so these figures reflect only genuine legitimate comments to posts.

This is true despite the fact that Wash Park Prophet has about 45% more page views per month than Dispatches From Turtle Island. A reader at this blog is about six and a half times as likely to leave a comment after viewing a page as at Wash Park Prophet (about one comment is posted per 155 page views at this blog).

This blog averages about 310 page views per day, although it is prone to spikes when I make a popular post that is referred by other blogs or social media or is on a hot topic, and when I make multiple posts in a short period of time, and lulls at other times.  

This is true even though it is consistently the case that I make more posts per year at Wash Park Prophet. For example, in the years when both blogs have been in place for a full year (2012-2019) the annual number of posts at each blog have been as follows:

Year       Wash Park Prophet     Dispatches From Turtle Island         Total   
2019       192                                    173                                           365

2018       226                                    213                                           439

2017       294                                    244                                           538

2016       414                                    210                                           624

2015       300                                    176                                           476

2014       205                                    126                                           331

2013       292                                    168                                           460

2012       376                                    222                                           598

I can only conclude that readers of Dispatches From Turtle Island are much more engaged with the content at this blog, which is certainly a good thing.

My Audience

Also, while I like comments, I am also delighted to have readers who very rarely comment but appreciate the content here. 

If you are a regular reader who very rarely comments, feel free to "delurk" in the comments at this post, just so that I can know that you are out there.  

I always like to better understand my audience.

Fun Fact: About 9% of my readers are in Russia, the #2 location from which this blog is read after the United States (which accounts for about 43% of my readers). 

Most of the rest of my readership is from other European countries (Western and Eastern Europe), from Canada, and from Australia (although I know I have several regular readers in New Zealand, where I lived for a year myself as an exchange student), as well. I do have readers in Latin America and Asia, but apparently considerable fewer of them on a country by country basis.

About 60% of my readers use Windows, about 17% use Macs, about 7% use Linux, and the other 18% read this blog on their phones.

Other Blogs Compared

Certainly, there are other blogs which a much more engaged audience, Eurogenes, Backreaction, The Reference Frame, Not Even Wrong, and Razib Khan's Gene Expression blog and his contributions to the Brown Pundits blog, for example.

Also, just to toot my own horn a little, while the number of posts at this blog isn't huge, only a handful of single author science blogs that do any meaningful analysis in the entire blogosphere are updated as regularly as this one.

This remains true in the separate domains of science covered by this blog even if you break this blog up into its two subcomponents, with almost 50% of the posts having math and/or physics tags (837 out of 1741 posts), and about 50% of the posts being about anthropology, historical linguistics, genetics, biodiversity, evolution and the history of the distant past, with only slight overlap (usually involving ancient astronomers).

I also aim to make about 3% of the posts at this blog humorous and I am currently two posts over that quota (54 humorous posts v. a quota of 52). Somewhat surprisingly, posts tagged humor are frequently also about mathematics.

John Baez's blog, Azimuth blog, and Lubos Motl's The Reference Frame are only ones that comes to mind on the math and physics side, although 4gravitons, which updates consistently once a week on average, comes close. 

Razib Khan's collection of blogs is the only example that comes to mind on the subject of the other half of what this blog covers.

I'm sure that I've missed a few frequently updated single author science blogs with meaningful analysis in the fields that this blog addresses, but I'd hazard to guess, not all that many. If you know of some, please let me know so that I can add them to my blogroll.