The company behind Rescue-Time, the popular software that is used to ascertain how you spend your time online, just put a stamp on what the techies had predicted the moment Google put up its super-addictive ‘Pac-Man tribute’ doodle, a loss of productivity! The guys at Rescue-Time did a rough 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. Here’s what a statement of their blog had to say:
“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 – 2x 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.”
Those who want to play the Pac-Man game at Google needn’t worry that it’s no longer visible, because they can find the game at its permanent link, here.