Some of these people managed to garner real readerships.
Mendeley's open research database, which provides metadata and real-time readership statistics, is queried more than 100 million times per month by "altmetrics" (alternative metrics) apps such as Total-Impact.org, Readermeter.org, or Altmetric.com.
Post-launch services and support include payment processing, real-time readership stats, app updates, and further programming and design support.
In real numbers, their readership is still dwarfed by the number of Americans who regularly watched The Sopranos or even Seinfeld, but factor in the far smaller number of people who read fiction and you can see that these authors have achieved market penetration.
The readership of real-life magazines is fairly uniform.
Real Simple has built its readership over the past four years -- circulation has grown from 400,000 to 1.55 million -- largely on people's desire to filter that noise.
The acerbic postings of "Fake Steve," as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership — both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com).blogspot.com
The high end of the scale, Ms. Hughes suggests, was fantasy, since "the real heartland of Beeton's readership remains that of a modest family, struggling to keep up the newly genteel style of living required of the middle class on an income that is often actually not much higher than that of a skilled laboring man".
A more concise discussion focusing on the main ideas, i.e. the importance of model selection, the assumptions of the Koonin & Wolf model, and the consequences of these assumptions in distinguishing simulated and real data would likely increase readership substantially relative to the present version.
