Just to begin with, I think none of those question should be asked about any specific instance (Gleev/l1.media) as they are all generic to Atlas/Orion/Joystream. Remember that Gleev is just Atlas, with some settings tweaked.
How does Gleev count video views?
It's a very simple mechanism. Whenever Atlas user starts video playback, request is sent to Orion that says "I've watched video X" and Orion increments the view count for this video in its database. This is kind of a placeholder solution until something better is available. This issue was discussed many times (Joystream/atlas#539, https://discord.com/channels/811216481340751934/812345044094156811/971774064962195466). This is far from ideal because anyone can easily send this request to Orion, spoofing a video view. To solve this properly something like Gateway Accounts (Joystream/atlas#1388) would be needed and that needs Orion v2. If what you're looking for is a way