We Spent 4,819,352 Hours on Google PAC-MAN
Google launched it's PAC-MAN Doodle on Friday morning and all of us groaned, "There goes a morning of work." We all assumed our productivity would take a hit, but how many hours did the world spend playing PAC-MAN on Friday?
RescueTime, a company that makes tools for businesses eager to understand how they spend their time put together some calculations based on how much time the average user spends on Google versus how much they spent on Google on Friday.
RT took the amount of time its 11,000 users on a regular, PAC-MAN-less Friday and compared it to the amount of time spent on Google on the Friday just gone by. The result? People spent more than half a minute more on Google this past Friday than on any other Friday. RescueTimes users spend, on average about four and a half minutes on Google, so adding an extra 35 seconds doesn't really seem like a big deal.
However, when you consider Google had more than 500,000,000 visitors on Friday (according to Wolfram Alpha), that's an exta 4,819,352 hours spent on Google. Sure, not everyone played PAC-MAN and a lot of those 500,000,000 visitors were probably just there to search and move on, but that number is big enough that even if you say half of everyone on Google on Friday didn't play, that's still nearly 2.5 million hours (2,409,676 if you want to be precise).
RescueTime estimates the dollar tally to be somewhere around the $120 million mark. That's if the average Google user has a cost of $25 per hour (cost being 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
"For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time," blogs RescueTime.
Read More:
The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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freename 35 seconds each?Reply
Imagine how much money could be saved if bathroom breaks were banned!
Stupid statistic is stupid -
idisarmu Google effectively helped waste over 7 (effective) lifetimes of 75 years!Reply
....oh well, Youtube is more evil in that sense. -
nforce4max treefrog07I played a couple of times, it was easier on the Atari with the joystick.Reply
Very little can replace the venerable 2600. -
ta152h idisarmuGoogle effectively helped waste over 7 (effective) lifetimes of 75 years!....oh well, Youtube is more evil in that sense.Reply
They are amateurs. I've already wasted more than half of one lifetime, and I'm only one person.