PinkBike used to be the go-to place for uploading media for further embedding in off-site forums (SouthernDownhill, SingletrackWorld, RideMonkey, NSMTB, VitalMTB) - for example, race reports, sales (when forums had limited storage capacity for users), etc.
Your media was watermarked and made available in different resolutions (a unique feature at the time on a bike specific website!)
I would bet a large chunk of those 5M visitors were hotlinks as I don’t remember their forums being too busy —- but I do remember them being very fragmented with too many subforums.
Unfortunately Facebook Groups has killed off the almost tribal online MTB communities now :(