From the Sydney Morning Herald…

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.

The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

How accurate is this? Probably not the most accurate since it’s a PR trick by company who makes a surfing control product.

But the concept is right on. With 34 million users one can guess at least 1 million of those are employed knowledge works with access to a computer / internet. Now consider a $40k / year average salary (arbitrary, but useful for my point) for those knowledge workers. If you consider an hour of Facebook time a day there is a loss of just over $10mil, daily, with just under 3% of Facebook’s user base.

Expensive waste of time? Sure. But if they weren’t on Facebook they’d just be somewhere else.

Tags: Facebook, Expensive Waste of Time