• by Ray Schultz , April 14, 2025

IPWatchdog.com does not have a paywall. But it desperately needs revenue, so it has found a way to monetize—bylined articles. 

“Moving forward, we will only allow law firms and service providers who financially support IPWatchdog to write for our platform,” writes Gene Quinn, president & CEO of IPWatchdog, Inc. “Specifically, we will only publish articles from those who have financially supported IPWatchdog in some way within the last 12 months.” 

Quinn explains, “This financial support can be through some combination of sponsoring webinars, sponsoring in-person programs, buying banner ads and/or sponsoring our podcast.”

This type of thinking is not unusual at trade publications, but IPWatchdog.com has actually gone public with it.  

Why this change? 

“Increasingly, as more publications charge fees to publish, require assignment of the underlying copyright, and place content behind a paywall, we are receiving more (and numerous) requests to publish on our platform,” Quinn writes. “And the increase has largely come from attorneys at large firms who never (or only rarely) financially support us.”

He continues, “Ironically, the pitches we receive typically come from an outside PR firm who is being paid to get us to publish articles for free. So, it has been hard not to notice that these firms never support us financially, they do support others financially, and—instead of supporting us—they are paying PR people to get us to publish for free. Clearly, we are doing something wrong and need to course correct.” 

Quinn clarifies, “Any articles submitted by law firms and service provides must still satisfy our other publication criteria, including being primarily non-commercial in nature. And this new policy does not apply to in-house attorneys, industry thought leaders, newsmakers, such as current and former government officials and judges, who are welcome to continue publishing on IPWatchdog.com.