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Google PAC-MAN Cost 4.8M Person-Hours
The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 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 six weeks of their time."
Also, Google made the doodle permanent.
...monetizing bad math and improperly understood statistics since 2006.
This is like all those bogus RIAA/MPAA/etc.-funded studies that assume a pirated copy is a lost sale. Much of the time spent on Google's PAC-MAN would otherwise have been spent on other internet time-wasting, not on productivity.
But who cares? Sometimes you just have to stop being so serious and laugh a little.
Ban the use of Google at work.
Because, I'm sure Google doesn't give back in terms of productivity.
But really. This is hard to quantify. Half of my dev team was looking under the hood to see how it worked. Directly lost productivity? Maybe, but I think over-all it netted positive for the team. I would argue that this sort of thing is good for productivity.
It was on a Friday, it's not like anything gets done on Fridays anyway.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Humans are not engines. You can't just give us caffeine and sugar and expect us to work all that time. We require mental stimulation or else our work suffers.
What HR departments don't seem to understand is that we are not robots or programs. Put anyone and have them do a repetitive task, they will quickly get mental numbness and their productivity will suffer. Now take the person and give them some mental stimulation now and then and they won't make those errors.
If you want something that will turn out the same quality of work 24/7, get a robot or program. Humans aren't like that. And saying that it "cost" $4.8 million just isn't understanding humanity.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Time that isn't spent productively is not necessarily wasted.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
How much did people urinating cost?
These numbers are tasty, but they also are misleading and jump to conclusions. They're assuming everyone who tried GoogleMan was at work? I wasn't ... I guess I'm the only person who uses Google for non-work purposes? They really aught to try to break into the "home users who use search engine" market, who knows, they may be able to significantly expand their user base.
They're assuming 36 extra seconds per visit, too. If you "count to 11" like they suggest, counting to 47 will demonstrate that they're guestimating far too much time was spent on GoogleMan.
The free market can't exist without government regulations.
You earned your +1 Indignant mod though. Congrats! :-)
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I suggest that Mr. Tony Wright learn a thing or two about significant digits. What a glorious heap of bull to take input like "if we assume our userbase is representative", "if we take Wolfram Alpha at its word","approximate cost of", "about 11,000" and then assert a figure like $298,803,988. 10 significant digits?!? Right.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.
No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds. You are utterly missing the point and seem to be claiming that psychological studies are somehow evil if they use clever ways to see how children are primed by words. The point of this sort of study is that it shows that language use can have subtle impacts on how people think. In those studies, even when you change the wording, pictures of males are still much more likely to be drawn than females. The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways, so it makes sense to try to use language that distorts that as little as possible.