BoxesandArrows has a great article about the lingering myth that important content (and even effective advertising) needs to remain above the fold. This is based on the author’s real world experience at AOL. A few nuggets:

On even being able to determine wherever the actual “fold” is:

In the ClickTale study, the three highest fold locations were 570, 590 and 600 pixels – apparently from different browsers running on 1024×768 screens. But the overall distribution of fold locations for the entire study was so varied that even these three sizes together only account for less than 26% of visits. What does all this mean? If you pick one pixel location on which to base the location of the fold when designing your screens, the best-case scenario is that you’ll get the fold line exactly right for only 10% of your visitors.

On the lingering pervasiveness of this myth:

And why? Because people think users don’t scroll. Jakob Nielsen wrote about the growing acceptance and understanding of scrolling in 1997, yet 10 years later we are still hearing that users don’t scroll.

Final thoughts:

Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Tons of great information in this detailed and realistic article. Check it out.