This isn’t exactly rocket science (in fact there’s a fair argument to say that it isn’t even science!), but we were trying to work out when the internet would overtake other media in terms of the value of recruitment advertising and have done some predictions for the next five years based on actual data since 2000. The results of the exercise can be found here.

The graph shows that in 2008 the internet will be the most valuable recruitment advertising medium, overtaking trade press in 2007 and regional press in 2008 (having already overtaken national press in 2005).

What we actually did was get a ruler and draw lines on an existing graph and work out the values of the four media in subsequent years! We then also thought about the likely value of the overall market and used this to tone down some trend lines to make them more realistic - ie it’s unlikely that the value of the market will totally collapse, so we have it remaining fairly static at £1.3 billion from 2007 - 2011.

Obviously there’s a huge margin for error looking at an exercise like this, but the results make compelling viewing, and as someone said to me the other day - ‘if your predictions are only half right it’s still massive’! Would welcome any comments / debate!