I think youtube does a bit of checking on views. The view counter is not real, IIRC the delay is due to asynchronous processing, youtube has time to do stuff in some cases. That's why a lot of videos are stuck at 320 views, that's the supposed limit above which the counting goes async and you get lots of vid with false views.
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There are videos with billions of views, I doubt that much fraction of the planet saw them.
I imagine it would horrible performance-wise. You would need to store list of browser fingerprints and check it on every view.
I think youtube does a bit of checking on views. The view counter is not real, IIRC the delay is due to asynchronous processing, youtube has time to do stuff in some cases. That's why a lot of videos are stuck at 320 views, that's the supposed limit above which the counting goes async and you get lots of vid with false views.