Pac-Man Google Doodle Cost $120m In Lost Productivity

Here’s something for a Google engineer to be proud of: the Google Doodle commemorating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man cost the world an estimated $120m in productivity, the BBC reports.

The statistics came from time-tracking company RescueTime, which says that its 11,000 users typically spend four minutes a day on the Google homepage. On the day the Google logo was replaced by a playable version of Pac-Man, that time rose to 4 minutes thirty.

That’s not a huge amount, but extrapolate those extra thirty seconds across Google’s 504 million users daily and that adds up to 4.8 million hours of lost time. If they’re paid an average of $25 an hour, that’s $120 million of lost productivity.

Put that another way, at a quarter a pop, you could play 480 million games of Pac-Man on that chunk of change.

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