There's buzz that 'The evolution of dance' has finally been knocked off the YouTube #1 spot by a fan tribute to an obscure Brazilian pop band called Cansei de Ser Sexy. waxy.org examines this in detail but doesn't nail whether it's definitely gaming, it just smells like it. At least partly because it's an awful video.
This is a long standing complaint, Mashable published Gaming YouTube for Fun and Profit in 2006.
Essentially, if you set your browser to auto-refresh a YouTube page (a Firefox extension does it), every time the browser refreshes the video has a new view added to it. People testing this, though, don't seem to necessarily see 1000 refreshes becoming 1000 extra views.
Numbers can be inflated by videos being embedded on high traffic sites but waxy couldn't find any evidence of that being the cause with this one.
There have been claims that the early high numbers for some Obama sites (such as his MySpace) and videos were also being gamed but that's now discounted I think as they're within range of other candidate products/other content.
What's annoying is that YouTube (Google) doesn't seem the slightest bit bovvered.
I'll stick to the Viral Chart for now for seeing where trends are — generally, the best policy with stats is to look first at the trends.
If only it were still as easy as it was in 2006...
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