> I think you would be hard pressed to give me a counter factual world that is believable where not doing this had a meaningful impact on Netflix's future. Som

> I think you would be hard pressed to give me a counter factual world that is believable where not doing this had a meaningful impact on Netflix's future. Some scale for perspective: if this had a 10x ROI, they'd get $10mm for $1mm. At EOY 2009 (same year this competition was paid out), Netflix had a twelve-month-trailing Revenue of $1.671B. In 2006 they took in ~$1Bn. So it's 0.06% of annual revenue at payout time, 0.1% of annual revenue at announcement/green-light time. The idea had a large margin of safety: in the worst case, nobody pays attention and you've generated some IP which would have cost ~$1mm to generate anyways, and which would theoretically increase retention (a top 3 KPI) by X%. And it had big upside potential, in the form of additional marginal hires, press/exposure of the core product in the news cycle leading to marginal subscribers. Re hiring: I think it's totally plausible that it contributed to ~5% of 500 peoples' employment decisions since 2009. Re subscribers: it's plausible to think it contributed ~1% to 10k peoples' decisions to subscribe, most of whom have retained to-date. It's classic "Brand Advertising" – and although it's difficult to quantify, it works. Those numbers could be way higher, but it doesn't really matter if they were or weren't, the margin of safety, uncapped upside of the brand advertising angle, and low relative cost made it a bona fide good idea. Edit: FWIW, that we're still discussing this idea in 2024 is more evidence that it was a good idea. This whole thread is full of Netflix's target demographic. We're all talking about how well-compensated and smart Netflix engineers are... You would never be able to purchase that kind of long-burn, compounding, high-expected-value attention for $1mm from any advertising network, in 2006-2009 or now.