<b>The "fold is dead" myth, and what eye-tracking actually shows</b>

<b>The "fold is dead" myth, and what eye-tracking actually shows</b>

Deep dive: Every few years someone declares the fold irrelevant because "people scroll now." The claim is half-true in a way that matters for landers.

Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking work (aggregated across thousands of sessions) found attention is not evenly distributed down a page. Users spend roughly 57% of viewing time above the fold, and the share drops sharply with each scroll. A separate set of scroll-depth studies on long pages found the first screen gets disproportionate fixation time even when users do scroll further — people scroll <i>past</i> things, they don't read them.

The mechanism is attention budgeting, not laziness. A visitor lands with a fixed, small amount of willingness to invest before deciding "is this for me?" That budget is mostly spent in the first 3-5 seconds, almost entirely on what's already visible. Scrolling is a continuation decision, and it's made above the fold.

So the fold isn't a hard cutoff where content vanishes. It's a <i>weighting</i> — a steep decay curve of attention. The practical error isn't "putting things below the fold," it's assuming below-fold content gets read at the same rate as above. It doesn't, by a wide margin.

For affiliate landers this reframes the layout question. You're not deciding what's "safe" to push down. You're deciding what earns the scarce top-screen attention and what your value proposition is, the single most important call-to-action, and one proof element. Everything below has to re-earn attention at each scroll.

TL;DR:
— Attention decays steeply with scroll depth (~57% of time above fold in NN/g data); the fold is a weighting, not a wall
— The scroll decision itself is made above the fold, so the top screen's job is to earn continuation
— Treat below-fold content as needing to re-earn attention, not inheriting it