It wasn't the swine flu but...

I uploaded my latest YouTube masterpiece on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday it got a handful of views. The views came mostly from you, my loyal readers. A few people happened to find it by searching for terms like "dehydrator."

Thursday there wasn't a single view of it. I was bummed.

When I checked first thing on Friday morning there had been one more view of it. Before he went to work I whined to Jerry that it looks like dehydrator videos aren't as popular as Blendtec Blender movies.

Then things changed.

I was burning a vacation day Friday (I've maxed out on how much I can accumulate). So I was always near a computer. About an hour after Jerry left for work I checked again. There had been something like 20 new views of the movie. A few minutes later there had been five more. And through the day the view counter just kept rising at a pretty steady rate.

I had gone viral!

YouTube gives us insight into how people discover our videos and where they are watching them. That information shows up the next day. So I was looking forward to Saturday morning to see what had happened and where it was happening.

Nothing.

Sunday. Nothing.

YouTube's Insight feature was broken. Their support page said their engineers were hard at work fixing the problem. Right. They were at home enjoying the weekend. Lazy engineers.

So I had to wait until this afternoon to see what happened.

Sure enough 94% of the views had come from email or other non-web page sources (like instant messages). Somebody found it and told two friends who told two friends and so on till all the world was getting in on it (just like with shampoo)!

Well, not the whole world. It has had 183 views now. It's been seen in at least 40 of the states. There have been only a few views in the rest of the world. And the pace of new views has slowed to a crawl. But there is potential to become the next Numa Numa dance.

Wish me luck!