Off Grid Lifestyle Growing in Popularity due to COVID

I got contacted yesterday by a CBC reporter from Halifax wanting to know if a Facebook group that I administer is more popular now due to COVID. The Facebook group in question is:

Off the Grid: Eastern Canada, and it is specifically a group for people living in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador.

I told the reporter YES, and here's why: The number of members in the group have soared in recent months. According to notes I made on the group page:

• We had 300 members back on January 13th 2020 (pre-COVID).
• We broke 700 members on August 14th.
• Broke 1000 members on October 24th.
• As of 10 AM today we have 1372 members, which includes 115 new members just in the last week.

So that is definitely way up. At the current rate of soaring new members I expect the Facebook group to break 2000 members sometime in January, so that will be an increase of 1700 members in a space of 1 year.

If I look at my blog, Project Gridless, there has also been a recent meteoric rise in popularity during the past year.

 Roughly 98K of the 400K visitors from the last decade are just from 2020. In 2020 you see a sudden and steep rise in the blog's popularity, with a minor dip in the middle during Summer (which is normal during Summer as more people are outdoors).

The highs and lows are also affected by blog frequency (how often the blogger is making new blog posts). If I write 90 new blog posts in a single year obviously that year will get more attention than a year when I only make 20. However in 2020 I have only made 11 blog posts up until yesterday (with this post being 12), and my most recent post was back in August. I have simply been very busy doing other things this year and I have not been blogging as much, and yet the statistics have gone way up.

I should note however that my blog isn't just about off grid living, it is also about outdoor activities like fishing, archery, etc - activities that have also seen a boom during the same time period.

It is a shame I cannot do polls on here... It would be handy for measuring whether people are more interested in living off grid these days due to COVID.

But I can do polls on the Facebook group.

So if people want to join Off the Grid: Eastern Canada I will be posting a few polls on there today.