Assumptions for Productivity Calculation

(Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen's column on intranet portals)

Let's make the following assumptions:

all employees spend 5 seconds more than necessary to ponder the headline because it is not sufficiently communicative
the poorly written headline causes 10% of employees to click on the headline even though the story is useless to them
people spend 30 seconds on average reading the story before they decide to back out because it's useless
the company has 10,000 employees using the intranet
the value of an employee's time is $50/hour (note that the value of an employee's time should be much more than their salary; not just to account for benefits and overhead but also to contribute to the company's bottom line)