The view count figure on the YouTube website is absolutely a real, true and official number, showing how many unique visitors landed on that video page. YouTube runs a very large business and their primary business is working with other sites and affiliate online marketing groups and sites for ad traffic, so the view counts are sacred territory for them. If it was so easy to just spoof the view counts by way of some http bot or something then none of their affiliates would work with them or give them money and their entire business would crumble. I suspec YouTube website contains internal logic which analyzes the traffic to a particular video and the same IP addresses are factored out of the count (and probably very close IP ranges as well, as in a DHCP web client just assuming a new IP but still within a certain sub net that was already counted). I do not know for sure, but I can tell you YouTube is one of the largest sites on the internet and they pride themselves on their distinct traffic, that is what makes them money so I believe that there is really no way to fake the view counts. If you had a bot making recurring requests to a particular url it would all be from the same IP and the internal logic would probably catch it and not add to the count. You can try it yourself, just land on an infrequently viewed video page and then navigate to some other webpage then navigate again to the video page, and the view count will NOT update (because your IP has already counted a unique visitor).

Cheers

$RFMK!