Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada’s pop princess, the pride of working-class Napanee, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song “Girlfriend” is now at about 110 million views, well ahead of second-place holder Justin Laipply’s “Evolution of Dance.” The fans over at Avril’s BandAids forum are no doubt celebrating, since the record is the culmination of a viral marketing campaign cooked up by the site. First, BandAids came up with a YouTube “view-o-matic” page, which loaded the Avril video every 15 seconds. This cheat was picked up by dozens of media outlets — including yours truly, in a post at my Globe and Mail blog, which got linked to by Perez Hilton (watch those servers melt!).

Alas, it later turned out that BandAids knew YouTube would — as its policy states — block the IP address of its automated viewer page after 200 consecutive views. Embedding for the video was also eventually disabled, although it’s not clear if that was YouTube’s doing or something Lavigne’s label did. In any case, what the fan site was really after was publicity for the video, which it got in spades. As a post at BandAids detailed, the resulting PR helped push the views of the video closer to 100 million every time a story was written about it.

The detail-oriented will no doubt point out that another video hit 100 million views before Avril’s: a homemade music video for the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy’s hit “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex,” which was used in an Apple iPod commercial, hit 112 million views earlier this year. The video was eventually removed from the top-view leaderboard by YouTube, however, after a controversy over manipulation of the viewer numbers (something Andy “Waxy” Baio looked into in depth), and the clip was later removed by its creator. All of which means Avril stands alone at the peak of YouTube viewerdom, which will eventually make her millions.

Some things achieve YouTube notoriety through some bizarre confluence of interest and desperation, like the six-second-long video clip of a startled prairie dog that took on epidemic proportions last year as a YouTube favourite known as the “Dramatic Chipmunk,” which quickly gained more than 9 million views. Other things need a bit more, well… assistance. At the moment, a fan site devoted to Canadian pop singer Avril Lavigne is pushing hard to get Avril’s Girlfriend video to become the most-watched YouTube video ever with almost 90 million views — and they are using some shady tactics to get there.

At the moment, the top spot at YouTube is held by Judson Laipply’s iconic “Evolution of Dance” video clip, in which the comedian demonstrates all the popular dance styles of the past five decades in one short video clip. Why is it so popular? No one really knows. In any case, a fan site called Avril Bandaids is trying desperately to push its heroine’s video higher than the Evolution of Dance — and in order to do so, it is not only sending out emails to fans to get them to watch Avril’s video some more, but has set up an automated YouTube-view-boosting site. The page automatically reloads Avril’s video every 15 seconds, so as to rack up as many hits as possible, and a letter from the site advises fans to keep a browser window open all day with the page in it.

Will such tactics get Avril to the top spot? Perhaps — although YouTube ireportedly tracks IP addresses so that repeated views don’t skew its numbers. In any case, there are a number of other tricks that marketers use to try and boost their YouTube views, including signing up for hundreds of fake user accounts under different names, or using popular (but misleading) keywords. A marketing specialist named Dan Ackerman Greenberg — who helped teach an entire course at Stanford about Facebook and online marketing techniques — wrote a post for TechCrunch in which he detailed some of the tricks. There are even sites that claim to be able to boost YouTube views for a fee.

Even if Avril does get to number one most-viewed video, however, she will still fall short in some other areas on the site: while the video is currently number one for “most discussed (music)” and number one in the “most viewed (music)” category, it’s still only number four for “most discussed (all time)” and an underwhelming number 15 in the “top favorites (all time)” category. Unfortunately for Avril, automated page refreshing isn’t going to change those numbers much. And who is the most discussed and top favourite of all time? The Evolution of Dance.