It seems to be that obviously youtube videos rank very well with a good title and tags even without all the views and thumbs up. I am wondering though how old this video is and how much time was allowed for this person to create these links. Because as we talk about at panfecta when google sees a link spike an action is taken either positive or negative.
Another point i would like to add is that when something is newly published online and the first day you build 1 link then 2nd day two 2 links and so on. So at some point when this guy with the video was building links he could have added a 100 or even 1000 per day and got away with it.
Hopefully he used partial match or brand partial match as anchor text or this will eventually get caught and suffer.