More directly, though, if you were to plot subscriptions to Netflix over time across an unlabeled chart, would you be able to see this contest?
Take my challenge. Plot their subscribers and revenue over time, hiding the year/month. See if you can spot any sort of inflection where this happened.
It /could/ be that they would have seen declining numbers absent this. Such that this prevented a bad inflection on the chart. I don't know that I find that compelling.
Like, I get that you can't measure everything. There are plenty of reasons to believe that.
I just can't bring myself to accept the odd logic that "popular tech company got press coverage which was instrumental in their growth." Seems there is a circular logic at play there that makes this such that, even if it is true, it is not actionable for anyone else.
Put another way, popular things get press coverage by virtue of them being popular things. At large, as long as they don't implode in very terrible coverage, they don't have to do much to get more coverage. Just doing anything will do that for them. To that end, odds are high we would still have discussed this even if they only offered something silly like a lifetime subscription for the winning team.