If you were to design a public park by taking the average location of every person who walked through it, you would likely place a single, massive bench in the exact geographical center of the lawn, a location where no one actually wants to sit because it offers neither the shade of the oaks nor the view of the pond.

Ana stands at the head of the mahogany table, clicking through a slide deck that has cost her three nights of sleep and a significant portion of her faith in human complexity. On the screen is a slide titled “Our Typical Viewer.” This person is 27.4 years old. This person watches 4.1 minutes of video. This person enjoys “tutorial-style content” and lives in a mid-sized metropolitan area.

Everyone in the room nods with the solemnity of people witnessing a divine revelation. They are looking at a phantom, a composite ghost stitched together from the limbs of ten thousand different people, and they are preparing to spend a quarter of a million dollars to please this ghost.

Ana knows the ghost isn’t real. She knows that in the data set used to create this 27-year-old, there is a grandmother in Liverpool who watches the same knitting video fourteen times a day and a teenager in Seoul who skips through every video in three-second bursts. When you average the grandmother and the teenager, you get a 27-year-old who doesn’t exist, who has never existed, and who will never buy a single product or subscribe to a single channel.

Therefore, when we design for the average, we are designing for no one, which means we are essentially building a very expensive suit for a mannequin that has no arms. This is the paradox of the digital age: we have more data than ever before about what real people do, yet we use that data to create increasingly abstract caricatures that lead us further away from the actual humans holding the phones.

I recently had to explain the concept of “the internet” to my grandmother. She asked me where the videos “go” when she stops watching them. I told her they stay on a server, waiting. She asked, “Waiting for what?” I told her they were waiting for someone to notice them.

“That sounds very lonely for the video.”

– My Grandmother

She’s right. A video without a viewer is just a sequence of code sitting in a cold dark room in Northern Virginia. But a video being watched by an “average” is just as lonely, because the average cannot feel, cannot laugh, and cannot lean in closer to the screen when the tension rises.

Decoding the Ventral Lean

As a body language coach, I spend my life looking at the way people occupy space. I look at the micro-expressions that flicker across a face in the hundredth of a second before they realize they are being watched. I look at the “oculomotor reflex,” the way the eyes dart when they are searching for meaning.

When someone is truly engaged with a video, their physical posture changes. They might perform what we call a “ventral lean”-angling their torso toward the screen, exposing their heart and stomach in a gesture of subconscious trust. Or they might exhibit “isopraxis,” where they begin to subtly mimic the head tilts or hand gestures of the creator on the screen.

These are the signals of a real human being. You cannot average a ventral lean. You cannot take the mean of a micro-expression. When we look at YouTube growth, we are often tempted to look only at the “Big Numbers.” We want the line to go up and to the right. But the line is a lie if the line isn’t made of people.

This is where the industry often fails creators. It hands them a dashboard full of averages and says, “This is your audience.” No, that is a map of where your audience used to be, flattened into a two-dimensional plane.

Consider the edge case: A user clicks a video, their phone rings, they walk away for ten minutes, and the video finishes playing to an empty room. The dashboard records this as “High Retention.” The analyst reports it as “Success.” But the intent never met the attention. It was a phantom interaction.

Conversely, a user might watch thirty seconds of a video, receive exactly the information they needed, and close the tab feeling deeply satisfied and loyal to the brand. The dashboard records this as a “Bounce.” The analyst reports it as “Failure.”

Because the spreadsheet cannot hold the specific movement of a person’s chin as they laugh at a joke, it settles for the timestamp of when the laughter likely occurred.

The frustration for the creator is that they are being judged by a system that doesn’t understand them. They are told to optimize for the “Typical Viewer,” which usually means stripping away the very idiosyncrasies that made them interesting in the first place. If you smooth out all the edges of a stone to make it fit the “average” shape, you eventually just end up with a marble-perfectly round, perfectly smooth, and utterly indistinguishable from every other marble in the bag.

In my work with Hugo N.S., I often see how people try to mask their true selves to fit a perceived “professional average.” They stiffen their spine, they freeze their facial muscles, they use “power poses” they read about in a book. They become less effective because they become less human.

The same thing happens to YouTube channels. They start chasing the algorithm, which is just a machine’s attempt to predict the average of a billion different desires. If you want to grow, you have to break the mirror of the average. You have to realize that the “average viewer” is a ghost that will never help you build a community.

Real growth comes from the “various”-the outliers, the people who watch your videos at 2 AM because they can’t sleep, the people who find your specific brand of awkwardness charming rather than distracting.

This is why social proof is so complicated. It’s not just about having a number; it’s about having a number that represents a heartbeat. When a creator decides to buy views for youtube, they are often trying to jumpstart the engine of social proof. In a world of phantoms, the most valuable thing you can find is a service that understands the difference between a bot and a person.

IGetKing operates on the principle that the “real” matters more than the “average.” They don’t give you a statistical composite; they give you the start of a distribution. They understand that a view is a signal, and if that signal is empty, the whole system collapses.

The Dark Roots of the “Normal”

The history of the “Average Man” is actually quite dark. It started with Adolphe Quetelet in the 19th century, who wanted to find the “average” human to determine what was “normal.”

He applied the mathematics of astronomy-used to find the true position of a star by averaging several messy observations-to human beings. But humans aren’t stars. A star has one true position. A human population has ten thousand true positions.

In the 1950s, the US Air Force realized that their pilots were crashing at an alarming rate. They blamed the pilots. They blamed the training. Finally, they hired a researcher named Gilbert Daniels to measure 4,000 pilots on ten different physical dimensions-height, chest circumference, sleeve length, and so on.

They wanted to design a new stickpit that would fit the “average pilot.” Daniels discovered something that shook the foundation of design: out of 4,000 pilots, exactly zero of them were average in all ten dimensions. Not one. If you built a stickpit for the average pilot, you built a stickpit for no one.

We are all trying to fly these digital planes while our feet barely touch the pedals, or while our knees are shoved against the dashboard, all because some analyst like Ana is telling us that our legs should be exactly 34.2 inches long.

When I explained the “average” to my grandmother, she laughed. She said, “If I have one foot in the oven and one foot in the freezer, on average, I’m comfortable, but in reality, I’m dying.” This is the best critique of digital analytics I have ever heard.

Messy Truth vs. Boardroom Legibility

The analyst’s job is to make the mess of humanity legible to the people in the boardroom. The boardroom likes legibility because legibility feels like control. If I can tell you exactly who the viewer is, you feel like you can control them.

But the truth is messy. The truth is that your audience is a collection of contradictions. They want to be educated but they also want to be entertained. They want you to be professional but they also want you to be vulnerable. They want you to be exactly like them, but also much better than them.

If you look at the successful creators-the ones who actually survive the “Great Filtering” of the algorithm-they are almost always the ones who ignored the averages. They leaned into their weirdness. They spoke to one person instead of a “target demographic.” They understood that a community is not a pile of data; it is a network of relationships.

You remember how they take their coffee. You remember that they hate the sound of whistling. You remember that they once told you a story about a dog they had in the third grade. You cannot average a friendship.

The slide remains a perfect rectangle even when the people it describes are jagged fragments of a broken glass.

We are currently living through a crisis of “The Composite.” From politics to marketing to social media, we are being governed by phantoms. We are making choices based on what “people” want, without ever stopping to ask which people, and why, and for how long.

If you are a creator, your job is to be the adjustable seat. You have to provide enough space for the grandmother in Liverpool and the teenager in Seoul to both find something of value in your work. You have to be “human-scale” in a world of “server-scale.”

Ana finished her presentation. The CEO stood up and thanked her for the “clarity.” He said it was “good to finally know who we are talking to.” Ana sat down and looked at her notes.

She saw a stray data point she had excluded because it didn’t fit the curve-a person who had watched the same video 142 times. She wondered who they were. She wondered if they were lonely. She wondered if they knew that, in this room, they had been erased so that a 27-year-old ghost could take their place.

Your viewers do. Don’t let the averages convince you otherwise. Growth is not about fitting into the stickpit; it’s about making the stickpit fit the pilot. It’s about recognizing that every “view” is a person, and every person is an outlier in their own beautiful, messy, non-average way.

When you stop chasing the phantom, you finally start seeing the people standing right in front of you.