We pointed out in October 2006 that it was easy to enter the Most Viewed list on YouTube just by opening some tabs in Firefox and setting them to auto-refresh - no real skill required. (For those who try refreshing the page once and see no increase in views, note that YouTube only updates its viewing stats every few hours). Based on the ease with which these sites are dominating the popularity rankings, it seems that nothing has been done to fix the issue. In other words: these unwanted self-promoters are doing nothing more than refreshing the page on one PC - when we tried this for our original post, there wasn't even any sign that IPs were being logged. For SMD, which seems to sell movie downloads, the process goes something like this:
1. Find an interesting YouTube video
2. Add your own site branding and URL
3. Upload to an account and disable comments so no one complains about you taking their clips
4. Auto-refresh the page 50,000 times
5. Get in Top Viewed List
6. Profit
Below is a screenshot showing that 7 of the Most Viewed YouTube clips right now are from SMD, and many others come from sites using the same trick. Eric Schmidt was asked about the problem at a recent interview (pointed out to us by The CoMotion Group), but downplayed the problem. It seems that a fix would be easy and straightforward: why not go ahead and fix it up?