This is incredibly true. If I was some type of marketing consultant or whatever, and lets say I was trying to market a band that was paying me (as if bands have money these days), if I could get them 60,000 views in a few days this would seem absolutely huge to the average smaller band. Their assumptions would be that they are getting huge in comparison to their local competition.
It doesn't matter that the views are worthless. Even if they know you 'did something' to make that happen, they'd be happy because other people looking at it would think they are more legitimate for it. Its all about perception. I remember people running various bots and scripts to blow up their MySpace music play counts. "Wow this band has 300k plays? They must be good!". Same could be said for Twitter follower count, etc...
It can all be gamed. The question is how many people realize its been gamed?
Right now it seems that number it's on the rise, so I guess is a matter of how long this line of business will last considering cash-strapped businesses wont spend a dime on something that's widely considered to be useless/ineffective.
You'd think that it would stop working right? Yet, it doesn't seem to. It just moves.
Overall there's a trend toward the value (ROI) of advertising almost always dropping as better data on the ROI becomes widely available. Advertisers try their hardest to show the ad buyers that the ads are being massively effective, and try to hide any statistics that speak to the contrary.
Most advertising isn't effective. Period. Of course, it isn't just the form that's bad, but the message as well so it can't all be blamed on the medium.
New forms of advertising like to pretend that new money is actually being spent by consumers. Surely, there is shift in consumer spending, but it rarely coincides with the growth of a new broadcast media. Just because there's Youtube|Twitter|MySpace doesn't mean more people are buying cars|music|clothing. Yet, brands want to throw money there in hopes that there will be.
Slowly there is a realization that those $10CPM ads were only returning $3CPM of investment. When enough people realize this (it takes a while) the value drops for everyone.
Sometimes it's hard to value the investment for ROI, especially in terms of perception as you mentioned above. The fact is though, social proof is an element of popularity and so people will continue to game social elements like that.
That's just the thing: just like it doesn't really matters if a product IS "the best" but if it's perceived by the population at large as "the best", advertising it's also subject to this kind of rationalization, and if social and viral ads become increasingly perceived as ineffective, a waste of money or worst, a scam, then it's over, since even if certain techniques are put forward to improve it and solve the inherent problems in the system, these ads will still be considered by many higher-ups to be useless.
It doesn't matter that the views are worthless. Even if they know you 'did something' to make that happen, they'd be happy because other people looking at it would think they are more legitimate for it. Its all about perception. I remember people running various bots and scripts to blow up their MySpace music play counts. "Wow this band has 300k plays? They must be good!". Same could be said for Twitter follower count, etc...
It can all be gamed. The question is how many people realize its been gamed?