14 DAY TRIAL // Google went with an unprecedented move on Friday by celebrating the Pac-Man’s 30th birthday with a fully functional game on the Google homepage. The move proved a huge success, prompting the company to continue to offer the Pac-Man custom homepage at a permanent location. It was such a huge success, apparently, that people forgot about their work and started playing Pac-Man instead, according to a report from a work-productivity measurement company aptly named RescueTime.
“This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday,” the company wrote on its blog.
Now, 36 seconds may not seem like a whole lot. It seems insignificant, but you have to take into account the fact that the average user spends only about four and a half minutes per day on Google.com, according to numbers also provided by RescueTime. Even so, 36 seconds hardly adds up to much.
But, when you also account for the fact that Google had more than 500 million unique visitors that day, it starts to take on a little more significance. RescueTime estimated that visitors spent 4.819 million more hours on the site on top of the 33.6 million hours of attention Google got on a regular day.
How much did all this lost time cost companies? Well, the firm estimates that it adds up to $120,483,800, that’s how much companies paid employees for playing Pac-Man. That sounds like a lot, RescueTime says it’s enough to hire all of Google’s 20,000 or so employees, including its two co-founders, for six weeks.
One expensive game, it would seem. Fortunately, the figure has no translation into the real world. It’s based on several clearly erroneous assumptions. First of all, it treats everybody as if they were at work. According to the calculations, all Google users were working when they visited the site on Friday. What’s more, the assumption was made that one hour of work from each and every one of the 500 million visitors would cost employers $25, a figure hardly representative of Google’s global audience. Still, it’s fun to play with this kind of big numbers, even though they’re not real.