The growth of the number of new OpenPGP keys seen on sks-keyservers.net has been very steady, until a few months ago. The increase is fairly dramatic as people are beginning to see the need to secure their communications. Tie this in with the last few months of (in)security news and it appears that people are getting the message that they need to actively use the tools available to to them, if they wish to keep at least a few tidbits of private information from prying eyes.
https://sks-keyservers.net/status/key_development.php
