Last Friday I posted about the 30th anniversary of PacMan being celebrated by Google on their homepage. And I also wrote that I was hubbing through Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on my way home and was playing the game courtesy of their free internet connection. I spent a while doing that and it killed a good chunk of my layover.
It seems that Google’s homage to PacMan didn’t just kill a good chunk of my time — it killed a good chunk of lots of people’s time — to the tune of $120 million. See the article here.
Google’s Pac-Man Logo Costs Society $120,483,800 in Productivity
We joked last week when Google changed its logo to a playable game of Pac-Man that the world’s collective productivity would take a sharp plunge, but it turns out that’s exactly what happened.
The blog for time management tool RescueTime did the math and determined that Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time, or $120,483,800 in productivity.
The cost was determined by looking at how much time was spent on Google’s (Google) homepage the day the Pac-Man logo was up (48 seconds) versus the average amount of time spent on other days (11 seconds) and multiplied by the number of visitors to the site that day (503,703,000).
The cost seems like a bit of a stretch, though. RescueTime assumed that the average Google user makes $25 per hour; that’s considerably higher than median income in Internet (Internet)-connected nations. Also, you probably can’t assume that everyone who visited the site Friday was on the clock at work.
If you haven’t wasted time at work playing Google Pac-Man already, you still have a chance to add to that lost productivity tally. Google has preserved the Pac-Man game logo at www.google.com/pacman (you can also download the game) even though the front page has returned to normal.
For those of you who missed it, you can find it at www.google.com/pacman.
Now get back to work!
…..Dan at aslowerpace dot net
