The Netflix Prize
What Happened
Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%. The competition attracted thousands of teams and ran for 3 years (won in 2009). It popularized collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, and ensemble methods.
Why It Mattered
Democratized machine learning competition. Popularized the idea of data science as a competitive field. Directly inspired Kaggle (founded 2010), which became the world's largest ML competition platform.
Organizations
Part of the Deep Learning Dawn (2006–2011) era · Browse all competitions & benchmarks · View all 2006 milestones

