How did I miss this for two years? Netflix is running a contest through “at least October 2, 2011 with a prize of $1 million.
But this isn’t a simple through you name and phone number in a hat and cross your fingers type of prize. You actually have to earn this one.
Netflix will pay $1 million to someone who can help optimize their recommendation system and improve it by 10% over the system they are currently using.
So far, Netflix has given away $50,000 for a group that improved on the algorithm by about 8.5% but will continue to run the contest until somebody reaches the magic 10% goal.
Why would Netflix be willing to pay so much for this improvement? Better recommendations will mean that people will have a better chance to find new movies they decide to add to their queue which means they will have more reason to run their subscription for more months which could easily be worth over $1 million dollars. Plus, if their recommendations get a reputation for being that strong, they will steal current and potential customers from Blockbusters mail subscription service.
It is interesting to watch how strongly these recommendation services get tied into sites like Amazon and Netflix and even news sites and blogs and people try to increase sales or just keep users around for more pageviews by finding other things on site that a user would be interested in.
My current system works well for me.
I doubt I’m going to get any money for coming up with that, though.
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