I learned about AI by participating in the challenge, and ended up co-founding an AI company as a result. Netflix got more than 1 million dollar in free advert

I learned about AI by participating in the challenge, and ended up co-founding an AI company as a result. Netflix got more than 1 million dollar in free advertising from it, and are still getting brand value out of it today. They implemented some of the algorithms, and probably got a 10X ROI through retention alone. As mentioned in the Quora answer, they were also able to recruit top talent - and that's much harder to put an ROI figure on.