Did Google’s Pac-man Cost the World Money?

by Mike Essex on 26th May 2010

Marketing managers may be interested to read about the potential cost of workers flocking to play a classic arcade game on Google.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-man, the search engine put a playable version on to its homepage, which according to Rescue Time – a time management software company – cost the world economy around $25 (£17.50) per hour, per worker, in lost productivity.

This equates to around $120 million in total, although what may interest marketing professionals the most, including those who use SEO services, is that is that Google’s 504 million users spent around an extra 4.8 million hours on the site while the game was live last Friday (May 21st).

Based on the viewing habits of Rescue Time’s 11,000 users, the firm was able to work out that visitors to the search engine spent an extra 36 seconds on the page per person on average, thanks to Pac-man.