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]