[mwexler]

That's fair. I originally had the word "devalue" in the comment, but I pulled it out. Why? No one is forcing the analyst to participate, but instead, they absorb the costs to get exposure or growth (or fun). Whether that's a fair tradeoff is up to each person, but given the number of folks participating in Netflix competitions, these, and others out there, a group of smart, analytic types feel the tradeoff is worth it.

[_delirium]

For the Netflix competition in particular, a lot of the entrants were being "paid" in research papers, grants, and academic salary, because it was a high-profile competition in a theoretically not-entirely-settled area (collaborative filtering), so even many non-winning entries could get published papers out of it. I don't think that can be infinitely replicated, in part because once there are dozens of contests, it's less likely any one will be as high profile, and in part because not every ML contest is as academically interesting (the Netflix setting was sort of "weird" from the perspective of traditional statistical models, not being a straightforward regression problem, whereas some of these are pretty straightforward).

[msellout]

I'm not (yet) a highly paid consultant in this area, but I still don't think it's worth my time to participate in most of these Kaggle contests. Even the $3 million prize for the healthcare prediction isn't worth it if you think you have a chance of beating current best-practice (and think you can sell your time or have a friend who can sell your time to corporations).