Views vs backlinks?

Stupidly I rushed into going for a keyword because it had high search volume and most of the competition was articles and a yahoo answers.

After recently going through each of the websites on page 1 of the competition some of them had backlinks in the hundreds, while others had less then a hundred or close to none. Looking at how many people had viewed them though it was extremely high. For instance number 1 was an ezine with 80ish backlinks but it was viewed almost 500,000 times. Obviously they've been around for a few years so question is, is it pointless to try for it?

I've only built like 50 backlinks so far through angies backlinks and someone elses, and I seemed to have the impression that it was the most importantly thing, but even after looking on page 2 of the competition people had hundreds of backlinks more then some of the websites on page 1.

im so lost.

pointless to keep going? Possible that the backlinks im using are better?

i have the .org domain name of the keyword, whoever has the .com has done nothing with it.