A thing not many indie devs notice is that some (not going to make names) tend to “inflate” their figures a bit 🙂
Like saying they got 5.000 daily visitors, 50 sales/day and so on. I remember getting a banner on a site, claiming they had 10.000 daily visitors, for one month. Well I had less than 12 referral from that site. Quite strange since the banner was right in middle of the HOMEPAGE…!
About the “false sales stats” that can be quickly checked. When I saw Atlantis and Professor Fizzwizzle sales report, I was a bit dubious, so I affiliated them.
After one month I can be sure that they were telling the truth: I managed to sell several copies of both games even from my site which is clearly targeting a different audience…!