I run Gnooks, a self-learning literature recommendation experiment which has been used by a few million people so far. According to their likes, Tolkien is the 3rd most popular author:
It just didn't seem that interesting anymore. They also lacked a grand adventure, and seemed rather pedestrian. I felt I was supposed to like Clarke, but was just bored with it.
Scifi isn't a particularly big seller (biggest genre fiction by a huge factor is romance and thrillers). Frankly the top entries do suggest a disproportionate amount of old S.F fans.
Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that.
Clarke is at position 293:
...
#292 John Flanagan
#293 Arthur Charles Clarke
#294 Augusten Burroughs
...
Very interesting. Do you track any sort of demographic data, such as age, gender and location? Looking at the top authors I would wager millennials are the biggest users?
The users only rate authors and enter no other data. So the only demographic data I have is the list of countries Matomo outputs. For last month, the top 10 countries look like this:
United States 46.4%
United Kingdom 8.1%
Canada 5.2%
Australia 4.3%
Russia 3.9%
Germany 2.9%
Italy 1.9%
France 1.9%
India 1.8%
New Zealand 1.3%
Yes, there are a lot of directions the project could evolve into. I have many ideas in a list. Finding a better business model than ads would be a good first step I think.
If you don't mind unsolicited advice, I think your service could easily facilitate a paid "newsletter" of recommended new authors based on some sort of user profile.
Affiliate links for the authors would be a start... Probably wouldn't be huge money, but links would be actually helpful and I doubt anyone would mind you making money of those links.
https://www.gnooks.com/top