Skip to content
Google changed its logo over the weekend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man.
It wasn’t like most google logos – static. Google partnered with Namco to make a fully-functional video game Internet users could play on the homepage.
No doubt workers all over the world took a few minutes out of their work day to play the 1980s classic video game hit.
How much did the world lose in productivity?
The RescueTime Blog determined that the Pac-Man video game logo cost society $120,483,800 in productivity.
They determined the cost by looking at how much time users spent on Google’s homepage the day the Pac-Man logo was published (48 seconds) and compared it to the amount of time spent on other days (11 seconds) and multiplied it by the number of visitors to the site that day (503,703,000).
It seems a bit high, RescueTime assumed that the average Google user earns $25 an hour, much higher than the average median.
Even if the collective workforce of the world hasn’t reached the $120 million, we can still make it up. Google has archived the the Pac-Man logo game at www.google.com/pacman. You can also down load the game.
On another note:
Despite Google’s contribution to lost productivity through it’s creation of the Pac-man logo video game, Google announced Tuesday that it had generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses in 2009. Its the first time Google has quantified its economic impact on the American economy. You can view and download Google’s economic report at www.google.com/economicimpact. or watch the video below
