Hidden Cost Of CAPTCHA – One Billion Dollars Every Month
by Blight Fighter
A June 5th, 2008 Time Magazine article cites Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who was part of the original CAPTCHA team in estimating that people fill out close to 200 million CAPTCHAS a day.
If the average person is slowed down by 15 seconds when they solve and submit the catcha, this means we waste 833,333 hours a day or 25 million hours each month proving we are human. If the average hour of productivity is worth $40, that represents $1 Billion every month.
The hidden cost of a single line of defense against Virtual Blight is 25 million human hours wasted every month or about one Billion dollars in lost productivity. 12 Billion dollars a year may not seem like much to the global economy with 2 billion web users, but that doesn’t begin to calculate the time spent dealing with email spam, webspam, comment spam, trust fraud, etc. Isn’t it time for a viable alternative to Captcha that allows applications to determine if the user is a human, an avatar or a bot instead of requiring us to do something computers are not good at?
