Last week the Google logo was turned into a playable version of the classic Pac-Man. It was completely awesome, and I can honestly say I spent too much time chasing blue ghosts (and of course smashing my fists on my desk when one of them suddenly because a real ghost again just as my hungry, yellow mouth touched it). Apparently I wasn’t the only one playing.
I don’t know if you pay much attention to RescueTime but you better hope your boss doesn’t. RescueTime is a productivity analysis tool that shows companies how their employees are spending their time, supposedly in the hopes of helping them. The company did a little research on the time spent at the Google homepage when Pac-Man launched, and the results are astounding.
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.
If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:
-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 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
-$298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our Pac-Man data journey as much as we have. Next up in our on our data-hacking list, we’ll be digging in to find the laziest and most productive countries and cities in the world. Where do you think yours ranks?
Crazy numbers. I love stuff like this, even if it serves no practical purpose in my own life. Oh, and as far as that productivity thing goes, I can tell you where my city ranks. I live in a beach town. No one is ever doing anything.
There are a lot of things I really loathe about Facebook. While it is a good place to connect and share things with my actual friends, there’s always the strange undercurrent of lurkers – people I haven’t seen or talked to in as much as a decade trying to keep up with me by watching status updates and the like.
