News: Pac-Man D-Day: 4.8 Million Hours Wasted

When Google replaced its logo with a fully functional version of Pac-Man to celebrate the game’s 30^th birthday, little did they realise just how much time people could waste playing it.

According to a study conducted by folks at RescueTime, using their software that calculates exactly how businesses and individuals spend their time and attention, visitors to Google spent an average 36 seconds more on the site than the normal visit time of 11 seconds.  Sure – this doesn’t sound like a lot – but when calculated across every user globally, this amounted to 4,819,352 hours of time.

RescueTime also calculated the expense of this time if assumed that all hits to the site were conducted during work hours.  If the average Google user is worth $25 USD per hour, the time wasted cost a grand total of $120,483,800 USD: Enough to pay the wages of every member of the Google staff for a full six weeks.

The interactive logo was designed to commemorate 30 years of Pac-Man, one of the most iconic games worldwide.  RescueTime says it’s lucky that approximately 75% of Google users didn’t realise the logo was interactive, or time wasting would have been off the charts.