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.

Comments

Yum, numbers are tasty

[masterwit]

Well it seems I skewed the statistic quite a bit..
Now the real question is, how many more hours will it consume talking about how many hours it consumed?
Begs the question doesn't it?

Slashdot manages that every day

[Qzukk]

You should be ashamed of yourselves for reading my post when you should be off curing cancer or saving orphans or something useful!

Re:Slashdot manages that every day

[antirelic]

Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution. Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). Such simple minded focus strips the mind of creativity; creativity which has dramatically advanced and improved the human condition.

I am a hard core capitalist and stalwart industrialist, but I am also a pragmatist. Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources. I forget what the name of the study was, but it took three sports teams and show the level of performance improvements over a team that 1) vacationed for a week, thinking about the upcoming game, 2) team that unceasingly trained for the upcoming game, 3) team that sporadically trained for the upcoming game. turns out the vacationing team that spent some time visualizing the upcoming game, produced the greatest results, with the team that trained too hard had the smallest improvements.

Long story short, expecting factory worker performance from skilled workers, is as foolish as expecting a successful heart transplant surgery from a line backer.

hour of pac-man != hour of lost productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What about urination?

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

How much did people urinating cost?

Re:In other words

[ink]

The free market can't exist without government regulations.

You earned your +1 Indignant mod though. Congrats! :-)

10 significant digits.

[linuxwrangler]

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.

Re:Competition

[clarkkent09]

I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.

Re:Competition

[XanC]

I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.