The Netflix Prize Was BrilliantGoogle and Microsoft should steal the idea.
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, at 5:37 PM ET
It's no surprise that Netflix has launched another contest to improve its movie-recommendations system—the $1 million the company gave away for the first Netflix Prize was the steal of the century. On Monday, three years after the contest kicked off, Netflix awarded the jackpot to BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, a team of seven engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists who managed to improve the DVD-rental service's recommendations by 10 percent. BellKor beat out another team—the Ensemble, with more than 30 members—that had achieved the exact same ratings improvement but lost by turning in its method 20 minutes after BellKor.
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StumbleUponImagine if Netflix had paid all these math whizzes the prevailing wage—say, $100,000 a year. The company would have had to shell out more than $3 million for just one year of the top performers' time, and that's assuming it could've sussed out who the top performers were going to be. Of course, many of the programmers worked far longer than a year, some of them setting aside their primary occupations in order to work on the Netflix problem full-time. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted to the New York Times, "You look at the cumulative hours and you're getting Ph.D.s for a dollar an hour."
But even that number discounts the contest's true benefits to Netflix. Had the company simply put out a help-wanted ad for software engineers, it probably wouldn't have been able to recruit many of the geniuses it found through the competition. That's because most of them already have other jobs. BellKor's members work for, among others, AT&T and Yahoo, and many members of the Ensemble are employed by the data-consulting firm Opera Solutions. The participants also spanned the globe. Netflix got submissions from people in more than 100 countries, and the winning team's members worked in New Jersey, Montreal, Israel, and Austria.
The Netflix Prize isn't entirely novel. Science prizes date back to at least the 18th century, when the British government offered ₤20,000 to the first person to come up with a way to determine a ship's longitude. Other notable innovation-prize winners include Charles Lindbergh, who won the Orteig Prize in 1927 for flying across the Atlantic, and SpaceShipOne, which won the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a contest to launch a privately funded manned craft into space.
But the Netflix effort was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it was funded explicitly for the benefit of a private company; though many participants were interested in finding better ways to predict fickle human tastes, Netflix was looking for research that would help boost its bottom line. The company has already folded some of what it learned from the contest into its recommendations system, and that has helped increase its customer-retention rate. The Netflix prize is also notable for what it was after—not a feat of derring-do, like Lindbergh's, or one of engineering, like SpaceShipOne, but rather a kind of mathematical recipe. Netflix was looking for an idea—and it turns out that Internet-enabled collaboration is particularly well-suited to fostering such abstractions.
Indeed, the Netflix Prize should serve as a model for other tech companies working on hard problems, as it combines the best parts of open-source development with the best parts of proprietary code. Just like an open-source project, the prize was remarkable for its spirit of cooperation—over the life of the contest, competitors frequently became collaborators, joining one another's teams when they realized that they could never win by going it alone. The winning team is actually a mélange of three different teams; they joined up in June, and their winning algorithm combines the best ideas of each group.
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Netflix should have spent that $1,000,000 before even implementing the rating system they had. It was so comically poor that I found it useful as a way to weed out the bad stuff: a high rating was a very accurate indicator that a film or TV show would royally suck. It was obvious that someone was stuffing the ballot box, so to speak. Let's hope that $1,000,000 means I don't have to invert their ratings in my head anymore!
-- maine_reason
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I've been with Netflix several years now, and I've found its rating system useful. It's not perfect; there have been times when a movie recommended turned out not to be my cup of tea, but by and large they've at least been interesting enough that I didn't stop watching. As I've rented more and more, the recommendations have gotten better and closer to my actual taste. Maybe you just aren't getting enough films from them?
If the improvements make things better, great. Even more fun! But they certainly haven't been "a very accurate indicator that a film or TV show would royally suck."
-- Serai
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