The creators of the Belgian website claim to register 221,000 visitors a day. As a comparison, the German journalists state that mtb-news.de and pinkbike.com - probably the largest bike networks in the world - do not even reach this figure together. For comparison with Ride: Ride.ch reaches 60,000 visitors - per month...

The fact that the Belgian website's figures may have been fudged is shown by mtb-news.de using an excerpt from Google Analytics, which was published on the website in question in several versions. The initially published excerpt contains the term "United Kindom" instead of "United Kingdom" - a spelling mistake that cannot be found on Google and suggests that the file may not be a screenshot but a manipulated image file.

Interesting is the number of visits the site claims for Switzerland: Over 145,000 visits are achieved per week. This would put the site in the same range as the online presence of Schweizer Illustrierte, St. Galler Tagblatt or the scene site usgang.ch in Switzerland. For a Belgian mountain bike website (with a German-language version), that's a rather memorably high order of magnitude...

Extensive research by mtb-news.de also suggests that the Belgian website has bought Facbook fans and Twitter followers in order to feign greater relevance. German journalists are right to wonder why, with 7,000 Facebook fans, hardly any posts receive a "like" and hardly any comments are made.