If anyone did the math — let's be generous and give her 150 million total views (neglecting the fact that her most popular video is actually hosted on RCA's channel which she almost certainly won't be paid for) — to have a $2 million dollar check that would mean she earned a $13 CPM with 100 percent inventory fill. From my personal experience, YouTube fills just a tiny tiny part of the potential views and can tell you for a fact that this is a total lie or idiot math from an idiot manager. I disagree with you guys that YouTube was bad and unmonetizable move by Google but if this were remotely true they would be making an astounding amount of money. One of my clients who has done about 30 million total views has made about $15k tops.

Chalk it up to McBride wanting to make good on the role of new media genius he's being made out to be in the press. With a 50 percent revenue split, the total take would have to mean YouTube's selling out its pageviews at a $25 CPM — and Avril Lavigne would be responsible for one percent of YouTube's estimated revenue for 2008.

In yesterday's quarterly earnings conference call, Google's Eric Schmidt said that they'd had most of their success in new ad formats with widget ads, not online video. We doubt Lavigne's fan base is spending all day customizing their iGoogle homepages. The only logical conclusion is that if any $2 million checks are being written, it's by Google to pay for the bandwidth that RCA and McBride are getting for free in order to market Lavigne.

An auto-refresh page which loads the video over and over.

Every 15 seconds this page will automatically refresh adding 1 view to Girlfriend's YouTube total each time it does. Keep this page open while you browse the internet, study for exams, or even sleep. For extra viewing power, open up two or more browser windows at this page!

It's the kind of view-gaming that advertisers would normally consider fraud — that is, if what fans were doing wasn't better the best advertising Lavigne and her label RCA could buy.

Of course, it was mere allegations of view-gaming that eventually caused YouTube to pull the previous pretender to the "Most viewed" throne, Clarus Bartel's Cansei der Sexy (Music is my hot, hot sex). But I have a feeling YouTube won't be pulling Lavigne's video any time soon. Once at the top, the views will simply snowball from there. And YouTube will be in the happy position of selling advertising against a pop star's music video that is, itself, advertising.

While the view gaming of the Girlfriend video might have juiced the stats, what's amazing is that it achieved its place with off-site embedding turned off. YouTube, a cross-site video pioneer that has now become a black hole where embeds go to die thanks to the DMCA and copy-protection filters, can't mind — because rather than running against ads on a third-party site, every Lavigne view is in on the company's site and in the company's salable partner program inventory.

Lavigne is still officially in second place, less than a million views off the leader's pace. In Laipply's video, the use of licensed music falls under fair use territory, but it's enough of a gray area that he isn't even in the partner program, and therefore can't generate a single advertising impression. Still, considering the controversy over retaking the top spot stirred by a lone Italian with video editing software and possibly some scripting tricks, I wouldn't be surprised if the situation wasn't being monitored manually with YouTube admins freezing view counts until the company can come to some agreement with RCA. It's the music business, after all, where a little extortion between friends is standard operating procedure.