It’s a numbers’ game, for sure, but you shouldn’t be cooking the numbers to win.  Call me naive, call me idealistic, but that’s my philosophy.

A recent post on Tech Crunch talks about how “two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international” use less-than-kosher techniques to boost views of their clips on YouTube.

My first reaction was, no wonder most “top Hollywood movie studios, major record labels, varieties of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international” suck and fail to succeed following the launch thereof, because the hype that preceded and surrounds their products and services is illegitimate and fake.

The poster states:

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.

This raises an interesting point: YouTube is a distribution outlet that offers both a promotional and commercial platform. If you are Hollywood movie studios, major record labels, varieties of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international, you probably view YouTube as a promotional platform and as such, only care about driving as much views of your video as possible.

If you are a content producer that turns to YouTube for distribution, as we are, clearly you care about the number of views, but you are more concerned about sustainable and legitimate views. Historically, publishers that create fake traffic or drive up pageviews through low-quality end up paying for it by having a hard time to charge premium ad rates and retain advertisers.

Interestingly, when people ask me about our business at WatchMojo.com, they naturally ask if our strategy is to get one of videos to be seen by a million people. To their surprise, I tell them we don’t.

In fact, for some time now, I’ve been telling anyone that will listen that video producers who focus on hits are the most likely to fizzle out.

Advertisers might get interested by how many people have seen your clips in the past, but what will get them to advertise alongside your content in the future is what you will do for them tomorrow.

So if you churn out volumes of high-quality videos that each get seen hundreds of times per month, week or day and each video serves as a promotional tool for other videos you’ve produced, then the streams start to add up considerably. It’s the theory of diversification at work, any single one video might not do a million streams… but as a group, you have millions of streams over thousands of videos.

Of course, if you are a “top Hollywood movie studio, major record label, variety of very well known consumer brands, or a number of different startups, both domestic and international”, then you don’t care about advertising revenue, you care about marketing potential.

What the poster is saying, basically, is nothing new, though it does seem odd that Tech Crunch would run the post… but that’s a different story…

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