Samuel Crocker

To your points Rand, from what I have seen there are a number of ways that people do this (including but not limited to the somewhat clever to the really old school - playing embed videos in the background with mute enabled, iframes, etc.). From the little bit I have seen around this YouTube does not appear to do a *great* job of filtering the views and the degree to which these views could have a positive ranking impact at least within YouTube, though I've done less investigation as to the knock-on effect within universal search/etc. Would also be interested to hear more if anyone else has experience.

The whole concept is funny to me. I've had a play around with the concept and obviously there are benefits to bloated view counts but I (and others on my team) have been on a bit of a constant crusade against this sort of activity. The views are meaningless and the type of eyeballs that you get through this sort of activity is meaningless. If you were to do it as a pure rankings play then there would probably be some benefit to be had but it boggles my mind that the people selling this sort of thing do so under the guise of "increased outreach" and report based on the number of views. Spoofing/buying views is not hard and never has been... getting people to actually care? Well that's a different story.