Autorefreshing is the oldest trick in the book. I touched on it a bit in Chapter 7, but it's important enough to be mentioned again in this chapter. Autorefreshing involves using an Internet browser plug-in to refresh any page (like a YouTube video page) automatically at a preset time interval (Figure 9-3). For example, if I set an autorefresher to reload my video page every 5 seconds, that would produce 12 views per minute, or 720 views per hour. YouTube has claimed to take steps to correct this; it tracks which IP addresses are viewing which pages, but the cheat still works, and it will still rocket your video to the Most Viewed lists if used often.
Users who autorefresh are easy to spot; typically, their video will have an out-of-control views-to-comments ratio. If a video has 100,000 views but only 12 comments, you know something is wrong. As with most of the cheating methods discussed here, autorefreshing is a short-term fix. It will inflate your view count, but it won't help you build a solid audience.