My recent analysis of Washington Post's homepage points out that the weak design of the bottom half of their page reduces reading. I received a comment urging me to tie the findings to actual revenue impact, so here goes!

Content costs money for the Washington Post to provide — they have to pay their reporters to generate it, their IT people to put it on the site, and their ISP for bandwidth usage.

If people decide not to read a piece of news because they're not interested, then that's fine. But if potentially-interested people don't see entire sections of content because of a design flaw, then they lose money, and their brand is negatively impacted — it will appear to people that the site offers less content than it actually does, and they will spend less time on the site.

Do they realize they are suffering financially? Probably not... they probably think it's "normal" to have low click-throughs from content below the fold. Just looking at their click logs, they wouldn't be able to realize that potentially-interested people never received the opportunity to click.