Better yet, smaller YouTube partner channels should start a class action for the money they lost due to the music industry illegitimately pushing them out of the way by faking their own popularity. (And no, I don't think either what you said, or what I said would work).

There's actually probably a legitimate case here for a class action lawsuit suing Google on behalf of its advertisers.

Assuming a $5 CPM, this article means Google is admitting to making at least $10 million from advertising to fake impressions.

I'm not sure about that. It seems that the flaw used (described in other comments here) just required to do a GET request on the video stream, not stream it fully. So whether or not fake impressions took place depends on how and when ad impressions are counted. I would think you need to download at least part of the ad for it to count as an impression.

I doubt that Google can be (successfully) sued because some other entity violated the ToS. You'd probably have to show that Google acted maliciously.

As a businessman I don't understand this. That would only cost Google a lot of money. What they most likely will do is either consider that sum to be a loan and not pay for the next 800m views or have them pay back the money.

The reason they won't do this to average Joe is simply that you don't generate enough income for Google to care about keeping you.

i dont know enough about youtube advertising to know the answer, but do big youtube accounts get paid purely by view numbers, or is it more like adsense where they get paid by clicks?

It actually is AdSense, but AdSense uses both CPM and CPC models, if I am not mistaken. I don't know if both models are used with YouTube videos.

If they do use CPM and Google doesn't shut down their AdSense accounts for inflating their impressions, then there's another example of Google applying a different set of rules with large companies than the ones they apply to ordinary users.