The Coworking Growth Hockey Stick

If there where any doubts about the impact coworking is having, Google Trends shows us how coworking interest is growing in the world. Growth is accelerating and we are beginning to see the famous hockey stick shape that investors like so much and that may have helped some people raise a lot of money, in these searches and also in coworking usage stats.

Google Trends Web Search interest coworking co working Worldwide 2004 present

The other things that stand out in this trends search are that:

  • The biggest interest and growth is in continental Europe, with Spain crushing it. We all had anecdotal evidence of this at the coworking conferences (namely at Coworking Spain). This shows how the word has become a must in a country that started getting into coworking well after pioneering Germany.

regional-interest-coworking-trends

  • The standard spelling is clearly coworking, without a dash. With all the initiatives that have taken place to make sure that people understand that it is coworking that should be used for the industry, it is strange to see the spelling with a dash coming back every so often. This may be because some people are still trusting the auto correct features of their word processors too much (and journalists their antiquated style guides), or because most of the growth is happening in non-native English speaking countries. As you can see the co-working spelling is used mainly in the USA and the UK, but amazingly France leads the chart, which reinforces the interest on coworking in the country.

regional-interest-co-working-trends

There’s a wealth of other information in Google Trends about coworking: go check it out!