I am pleased to report our April 2009 statistics, which show what is probably fair to say is our second best monthly traffic totals since IPWatchdog.com went live in October 1999. I say “probably” because we had about 10,000 fewer unique visitors in April when compared to March, but the total number of pages viewed in April was more than during March, and we are closing in on half a million page views a month!  The likely reason for the lower unique visitor total is due to the fact that in March there was overwhelming interest in one particular article relating to President Obama’s interest in exploring open source solutions.  Although this article originally appeared in January, it seemed to go viral in March, accounting for nearly 15,000 page views in the month of March, which is 5 times the number of page views of the top blog article for April.  What I believe this shows is that our core audience is increasing month-to-month, which is extremely gratifying.  I suspect it also shows I need to write more about open source topics!

In any event, here are the numbers:

Before moving forward with the top posts and referring sites, I would like to thank the following people who either contributed as guest authors or took time to be interviewed during April 2009: Chris Mammen, Ron Reardon, Mark Malek and Ron Katznelson.  Thanks also to the many anonymous people from the USPTO who are commenting and giving us important insights, and to my usual sources who I know prefer to also remain anonymous.

Here were the top 10 blog posts (by traffic) during April 2009:

1. Open Source Race to Zero May Destroy Software Industry
2. Red Bull Wins Trademark Lawsuit
3. Who Knew Avon Had Patents?
4. Huge Changes to Senate Patent Reform Bill Announced
5. Octomom Nadya Suleman Files Trademark Applications
6. USPTO Budget Crisis and the Anonymous Patent Examiner
7. Announcement Nears on New Patent Office Director
8. USPTO Backlog: Patent Pendency Out of Control
9. Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Patent Reform Bill
10. An Old Patent Examiner Explains Poor Patent Quality

I also appreciate those who link to IPWatchdog.com and send us traffic. The top 30 referring sites from March 2009 were (excluding several websites I own):

1. PLI Patent Practice Center
2. Linked In
3. Reddit
4. Groklaw
5. Wikipedia
6. Linux News
7. The 271 Patent Blog
8. Investor Village
9. Patently-O
10. IPNewsflash
11. Twitter
12. Patentably Defined
13. Patent Baristas
14. PHOSITA
15. Ezine Articles
    
16. Intellectual Property Network
    
17. Facebook
18. Inventor Spot
19. Zen Habits
    
20. AI IP Blog Highlights
21. Av vo Blog
22. Information Week
23. NetVibes
24. Just An Examiner
25. IP Today
26. European Patent Office (internal Wiki)
27. ZD Net
28. The Patent Prospector
29. IP Related Info
    
30. Mr. Smith’s Science Class

Onward and upward in May! I really appreciate the interest in IPWatchdog.com and I will continue to work to keep things fresh, informative and at least to some level entertaining.