Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Google's Pac-Man logo costs businesses $120 million.

But no business lost more than the law firm of Inky, Blinky, Pinky & Clyde. From NY Daily News:
On Friday, when Google embedded a playable Pac-Man game in its logo to celebrate the game's 30th anniversery, the Daily News predicted that productivity would take a serious hit as gaming enthusiasts stopped working to play.

According to a new study, we were right.

RescueTime, a company that helps businesses analyze how workers spend time on the job, took a random sample of its users and found that:

* Workers distracted by Google Pac-Man cost businesses a whopping 4.82 million hours of work -- an estimated loss of $120,483,800 (assumes the average Google user had a cost of $25/hour).

* That $120 million sum is more than the combined earnings of all Google employees -- including company founders Larry Page and Serge Brin -- for six weeks.

RescueTime also estimates that the average user spent 36 seconds more on Google on Friday than on an average day -- an uptick apparently caused by online Pac-Man fever.

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