SIPO recently published its 2013 data on hits on Chinese government IP websites.   Overall, there were 2,974,407,259 hits on Chinese government IP system portal websites in 2013.  Total numbers of distinct on IP addresses were 30,066,575.

The three biggest foreign countries in terms of visitors were the US, France and Canada.  In terms of origin of page views, China was number one: 934,297,096.  The US was number two with 136,552,861.  France trailed at 6,120,926.  To put that in perspective, US page views were 14.6 percent of the total – which is rather high.

There were 554,028,775 hits to the Chinese language patent search engine. Amongst English language hits, news ranked first (381,612), and law and policy was second (164,226).

The biggest domestic source of domestic page views were Beijing and Guangdong (approximately 286 million and 90 million, respectively).

There was a minor spike in visits in April (IP Day/Week – April 26, I presume),  another spike in July and August,  but the  big spike was in December with  an especially large growth in IP addresses towards year end, as the 12 month chart below of visitors indicates.

The year end spike parallels the increase in patent filings at year end (https://chinaipr.com/2013/02/16/autumnal-hook-2012-update/.  )My guess is that seasonality in utilization of patent search engines would more closely approximate trends in patent filings, while overall utilization of government IP websites may tend to track IP campaigns and policy initiatives.

The ratio of distinct addresses to page views is about 100 hits per IP address (approximately 3 billion hits/30 million IP addresses).  We are an information-oriented profession!

I noted in an earlier blog “The Chinese IP Hits Parade”  that foreigners learn about Chinese IP from Chinese government websites, particularly when Chinese data is compared with US and European sources of information on the Chinese IP environment.    By comparison, total hits on my bog last year were 30,000, a number that pales in comparison to the millions of page views from foreign IP addresses on Chinese government websites, or in terms on Chinese government English language websites, where the differences narrowed.

While the data suggests continued growth in information services on IP, it would be useful if SIPO provided the tools to make better year on year comparisons or listed all of the Chinese government IP websites it is tracking.  Other problems: the numbers of page views is about one third lower than hits in SIPO’s report, which is hard to fathom, since each hit is necessarily a page view.  In addition, there appears to be a large spike in US utilization of SIPO websites compared to 2012 data in 2013, which is also hard to understand.

Source: http://www.sipo.gov.cn/zscqgz/2014/201405/t20140508_946303.html (关于全国知识产权系统政府门户网站2013年统计情况的通报) (Report Concerning the Statistical Situation of The Chinese Government National Network of  IP Portals in 2013).