I complained over the weekend that YouTube is increasingly being gamed by users. I decided to test out how hard this would be - as it turns out, it's exceptionally easy to rank among the most viewed videos and channels by simply refreshing the page. This widespread gaming might also throw into question YouTube's claim of serving 100 million videos per day.
Meanwhile, gizmozCOM has viewed 39,083 videos over the past month - around 58 per hour if he stays awake for 24 hours per day. Incidentally, he also has the 22nd most viewed channel this week. Or how about lamo1234, who has personally watched 1,052,747 videos over the past six months - more than 243 an hour during a 24 hour day? Also note that these are only people who forgot to log out of their accounts before refreshing the page - most of the cheaters would remember to do that.
And view counts are just one of the metrics that are being gamed: this junk is making it to the other sections, too. Just logging IP addresses would probably kill off the worst of it. But with the top YouTube stars getting copious amounts of press coverage and deals with the likes of NBC, it seemed inevitable that these problems would arise.