The heat maps of eye movement were fascinating...I noticed the almost complete lack of activity on the advertisements immediately. Users appear to do what I do, just simply ignore them or try and filter them out.
The lack of detail in what their users were actually doing on the sites they tested makes it hard to tell what they're trying to dispel.<p>If you're giving users a specific task to perform on a specific website in a controlled environment, then <i>of course</i> scrolling isn't going to deter them. The argument against scrolling is that if you're trying to <i>attract</i> users to your site---to pick your site over other potential sites---then scrolling will be a factor when people want to make a quick decision if your site is useful or not.
Jakob Nielsen helped to popularize the myth that web users don't scroll down. It led to an era of website design that crammed as much onto one page, leading to busy, crowded homepages. It wasn't until later that early adopters of CSS made websites simple again, in part to avoid compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.
I'm curious as to what their test protocol is that it has dispelled every other posting on this topic. A person told to buy shoes at Amazon.com isn't going to be stifled by a scrollbar, but someone who isn't being directly told to interact with the website in a given manner doesn't seem as likely to scroll down looking for content that isn't found on a sparsely populated top page.<p>(Related: <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/word-matching.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/alertbox/word-matching.html</a>)
Whether users want to scroll or not, depends from situation to situation. Visitors will not always scroll. So it's not just a myth.<p>It depends on the type of page and the type of website.<p>A nice article illustrating when users want to scroll (and when not) can be found at <a href="http://webusability-blog.com/page-fold-fact-or-fiction/" rel="nofollow">http://webusability-blog.com/page-fold-fact-or-fiction/</a>. It also gives some good examples of good use of the area above the page fold.
Worth noting that while you can have content below the fold and signal to users to find it, that's not true with branding and identity features - those should be prominent and above the fold.<p>Further, as a commenter on the article pointed out, there's benefit in identifying your audience. Someone on NYT is obviously willing to scroll. Can the same really be said of someone shopping for a luxury car and looking to be wowed?