As Crow said, the first 3-4 views that appear within the first few seconds / minutes of listing are Ebays bots that run through each listing checking for issues, illegal content, and whatever else Ebay wants to check for. Your own views of your own items also count as a view. Beyond that, who knows.
Sometimes I dont even get bots looking at my items for over a week. Even though the item is searchable, 0 views. Sometimes Ill get 70 vuews in 10 days (my new accounts BTW, which are NOT linked by paypal details, CC or name / addresses, consistently get MANY MANY more views than my old regular selling account (same types of items and desciptions), as well as many more EBay emails invites and incentives to use the site. Probably not a coincidence).
As Dylan said, the entire system doesnt work properly (or maybe it works for Ebay, they just havent told us the truth about it all, hence we think its broken).
I think EBay has made their whole back end so complicated that it just doesnt work very well any more, and it would take an entire overhaul to fix. So while the views are inherently 'broken', they also seem to be manipulated by EBay as well.
In other words, ignore them, even if they do work some times, thats not much help if you cant distinguish between working and not working. So its likely they really arent telling you anything particularly useful.
