We love studies here at iDB, especially when they result in entirely meaningless numbers that are almost guaranteed to get traction. Studies like this one, for example.
UK firm iBingo has questioned just 2,000 iPhone owners about their working habits, and in particular, how much gaming they do during working hours. Turns out, they all ‘fessed up to playing games on their iPhones for around one hour a day. From there, iBingo took the numbers and ran with them, and have since made some bold claims based on those 2,000 users…
Extrapolating those 2,000 results, iBing believes that the UK’s 2,000,000 iPhone owners are wasting 57 million working hours by playing games such as Angry Birds, each and every year. The real cost of those hours going AWOL? A cool £800 million.
Now far be it from us to pore scorn over someone else’s (presumably) carefully performed study, but does 2,000 people being questioned really give enough data to come up with such claims? As Macgasm is quick to point out, are these people doing no work outside office hours, either?
We find the most interesting point of the study to be the discovery that only 28% of people admitted to playing iPhone games while on the toilet.
That probably says more about us than the study!