Where's the "Tried it, stopped uploading because my camera died" option.

or the, "I have an account, and I upload videos, but nobody ever watches them."

Yeah, I second the "no one ever watches them" sentiment . . . except for one crappy school project that happens to contain the word "Alphabet." Man that thing gets like a gazzillion hits--all from disappointed parents.

What I kind of figured out is... if you're genuine, hitting on relevant topics to general interests, you'll get a few hits.

(Aka - youtube is a community, Share the love to get the love. If you're not active on other people's youtube pages, videos, commenting, sharing, favoriting, subscribing... you end up getting less hits than if you are active. Group channels will get bleed-over hits and subscribers, but it's up to YOU to keep them.)

If you're lucky AND genuine, you get picked up by other youtubers or get skyrocketed by a blogger/news site.

If you're just plain lucky (content or not) you go viral.

I had a video on my channel that was the first demonstration of a major hack for the PSP game system; it had somewhere upwards of 10 million hits.

And then I deleted my channel and started over with a new one...