Pacmania: Google’s Pacman costs world billions

As reported the other day, to celebrate Pacman’s 30th birthday Google created a playable Pacman version of its logo. It’s now permanently available. The playable logo is estimated to have consumed 4.8 million man hours globally.

RescueTime is a program that monitors online usage. They extrapolated their data to reach that figure.

Here’s the baseline:

Our average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but next time you do a search, count to 11- it’s a long time.

Here’s what the study found:

The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.. Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.

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.