When is a View not a View? When it’s on YouTube!

Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggaration but one of the things that makes web video tough to cashify is figuring out just what to charge for.  What does getting 1,000,000 “views” on YouTube really mean.

A recent dust-up with some Avril Levigne supporters creating autoplay embeds on her video “Girlfriend” so that it would beat out “The Evolution of Dance” to become the so-called most popular video on YouTube.

According to NTV, this might have caused a change in policy over at YouTube:

“…we have reason to believe the site has stopped counting views from videos set to play automatically on pages around the web. We first took notice of the issue when popular producers contacted us saying they’d seen a dramatic drop-off in the number of views they receive for new videos. It’s possible that YouTube has adjusted more than one aspect of its view count methods, and it’s also possible that the view count methods are just malfunctioning. But enough people are mentioning the autoplay issue that we think there’s a good chance that’s the issue.”

While it’s a good step for YouTube to take I don’t think it is going to make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things.  There will still be plenty of people out there able to game the system and the actual value of a view will remain in the eye of the beholder.

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• Do View Counts Really Matter? Avril Lavigne v. Evolution

Do View Counts Really Matter? Avril Lavigne v. Evolution

There is a neat piece in NTV about the battle to be the #1 Most Viewed Video on YouTube.  For quite some time that spot has been held by a video called “The Evolution of Dance” clocking it at 90,071,493 as of 6:00 PM on June 26th.

The #2 spot is held by popstar Avril Lavigne and her video “Girlfriend” at 89,284,333.

Avril’s “people” really want her to be #1 and they are willing to do anything to get her there.  This includes:

“To fire up the all the Sk8ter Bois and girls for this web video battle royale, the somewhat-creepily titled AvrilBandAids.com has set up a “refresher” page to try and game the system. Keep the page open and it will refresh the Lavigne video page on YouTube every 15 seconds.”

This all begs the question, what do these views mean?  And if you can trick the system so easily does your view rank even matter?

Obviously, legitimate metrics are going to be key to increasing our ability to cashify our new media content.  For now, YouTube view count seems to be a respected number but if things continue like this it won’t mean much for long.

Here is the Evolution of Dance Video (the Avril video has embedding disabled at her request…)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en]