LOL! GOOGLE'S PLAYABLE PAC MAN LOGO COST BUSINESS $120 MILLION IN LOST WORKER PRODUCTIVITY!

On Friday, when Google embedded a playable Pac-Man game in its logo to celebrate the game's 30th anniversery, the Daily News predicted that productivity would take a serious hit as gaming enthusiasts stopped working to play.
According to a new study, we were right.

RescueTime, a company that helps businesses analyze how workers spend time on the job, took a random sample of its users and found that:

Workers distracted by Google Pac-Man cost businesses a whopping 4.82 million hours of work -- an estimated loss of $120,483,800 (assumes the average Google user had a cost of $25/hour).
That $120 million sum is more than the combined earnings of all Google employees -- including company founders Larry Page and Serge Brin -- for six weeks.


RescueTime also estimates that the average user spent 36 seconds more on Google on Friday than on an average day -- an uptick apparently caused by online Pac-Man fever.

Read full findings on RescueTime Blog here.

The study assumes that RescueTime's users are representative of the American workforce.