Measuring The Cost Of Google’s Free Pac-Man Game

Google may have provided a free online version of the classic Pac-Man arcade game last week, but it was businesses that paid the cost to the tune of over $120 million.

Online denizens spent over 4.8 million hours playing Pac-Man on Friday, when Google replaced its logo with the game on its homepage, according to a blog post by Tony Wright, CEO of RescueTime .

RescueTime is a Seattle-based company which offers Web-based time management and analytics tool for knowledge workers and their managers.

The company arrived at its estimate by noting that the average Google user spends about 4.5 active minutes searching on Google spread over 22 page views, or about 11 seconds for each Google page view.

RescueTime, which has a repository of second-by-second data on users’ activities, then took a random sampling of 11,000 of those users to learn that the average user spent an additional 36 seconds more using Google on Friday than on previous Fridays, Wright wrote.

The company also said that Google had 504.7 million unique visitors on Friday, based on data from Wolfram Alpha, part of Champlain, Ill.-based research firm Wolfram Research.

Extrapolating its data across the Wolfram Alpha data, RescueTime estimated that online computer users spent over 4.8 million hours playing Google Pac-Man on Friday, Wright wrote.

RescueTime also said that, assuming the average Google user costs a company $25 per hour including salary and benefits, companies lost about $120.5 million on Friday.

It could have been worse, Wright wrote.

To play the Pac-Man game, users had to click on an “insert coin” button next to the search button. “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,” he wrote.

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