Germane to really nothing, but here's an interesting popularity list from 2007 on one of the comic websites with the most traffic at the time: https://www.cbr.com/top-100-dc-and-marvel-characters-master-list/
While it comes from comic fans alone, it's fascinating to see where Iron Man stacks in terms of popularity for Marvel comic readers as a subset - still at #11 at the time, in the year before Iron Man comes out.
I think the list definitely seems very par-for-the-course by Civil War era standards. Spider-Man and Captain America make sense as the top two, Daredevil as a character for comics readers has always been a real critical darling, and Doctor Doom is easily the most popular perennial villain in the company. The Thing and the Hulk were longtime brand ambassadors, sure. In comics, the X-Men were starting down a real tailspin by this point. After Grant Morrison, a succession of weak runs probably put the highest-rated mutant at #7. Not to mention vote-splitting meaning that X-Men fans would have to divvy up their votes over a large ensemble which hurts each of their chances.
Hawkeye had just died, so this was a huge anti-Bendis vote, I would imagine.
Anyways, it's really kind of cool to see what the popularity of these characters was within the community. Not a particularly penetrating insight for the wider popularity of the characters, but it's pretty cool to look back and see just where the readership base was in 2007, right before the MCU is about to explode on the scene.
"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful