As you probably saw either on Google, my site or any of the thousands of sites that reported it. In order to celebrate Pacmas 30th anniversary the folks at our favorite company Google, made their first ever animated doodle which let you play Pacman with its original sounds and levels. The blog at rescuetime.com has speculated that this awesome little stunt may have cost us $298,803,988.
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 don’t believe this numbers to be anywhere near accurate and I still appreciate and enjoyed thoroughly what Google did. I wonder if anyone ever calculated how much money we loose on Facebook every day?