Forum old-timers may remember my rambles about motorbike racing's battle to get into the mainstream. (they were posted on the old forum so aren't here anymore).

Having a browse through some threads elsewhere I noticed someone quoting some interesting stats from alexa.com which is a web traffic measuring site. It gives the rankings for all sites in the world directly, so is completely impartial. For instance, the top sites overall are Google, Yahoo, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, etc and you can check the ranking for any site by typing it in. For motor racing it gives a fair comparison of relative popularity, since it considers all web traffic in the whole world (unlike this forum which is a niche market). And yes, I know I'm not a populist but it's quite interesting.

Anyway, someone posted the rankings for the world's major car racing series sites into which I've now slotted the ones for motogp.com, worldsbk.com, britishsuperbike.com and amasuperbike.com :

Site / Rank

Formula1.com: 1694
NASCAR.com: 3234
MotoGP.com: 7342
NHRA.com: 33,956 (drag racing!)
WRC.com: 35,256
IndyCar.com: 52,076
ChampCarWorldSeries.com: 73,903
DTM.com: 84,521
v8supercar.com.au: 111,304
MotocrossMX1.com: 142,915
WorldSBK.com: 147,979
FIAWTCC.com: 149,342
AmericanLeMans.com: 178,493
GP2Series.com: 178,677
FIAGT.com: 189,052
BTCC.net: 192,086
A1GP.com: 194,852
Speedwayworld.tv: 219,555
BritishSuperbike.com: 220,255
WorldSeriesByRenault.com: 222,148
Grand-Am.com: 247,168
LeMans.org: 273,897
etc...
AMASuperbike.com: 491,731
etc...

By my reckoning then, MotoGP is the third most popular form of motorsport after F1 and NASCAR and a massive distance ahead of the next most popular. And NASCAR has almost exclusively US-based fans (83% of them). Our biggest demographic for motogp.com is a tie between Spain and Indonesia with 7.3% of traffic each and an excellent spread between lots of other countries, so worldwide we're second really.

So, from this I'm concluding that we're pretty much there as regards being popular in the world, and that we have an outrageously low position on the front page of the forum, that considered!