For someone who writes a lot, I like numbers. Statistics was one of my favorite courses in school, and (contrary to what most kids say about classes) I actually apply stats to my everyday work.

This morning a blog post on the odds of a YouTube video “going viral” caught my attention and reminded me of the power of statistics. Noah Brier pointed out an article that appeared in Slate in which author Chris Wilson runs the numbers on YouTube videos and calculates the odds of any given video becoming a viral sensation:

“On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views–that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.”

This is good information for any advertiser who thinks “let’s do a viral video” or “let’s just put the commercial on YouTube and a million people will watch it.”

Viral is a result, not a tactic.

Aside from the statistics, take a minute and think about the most-viewed videos on YouTube. Some are odd. Some are offensive. Some feature news reporters stomping grapes, taking a nasty fall and making strange guttural noises. Some feature chimpanzees doing strange things. To achieve a “viral” result, this is territory you must be willing to tread.

Otherwise, more than likely, your video is going to be a statistic.