[_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).